


the killing moon

by nilchance



Series: that space pirates AU [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Brainwashing, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Memory Alteration, Mistaken Identity, Underfell Papyrus (Undertale), Underfell Sans (Undertale)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:14:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26500462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nilchance/pseuds/nilchance
Summary: Red comes home. Edge is waiting for him.
Relationships: Papyrus & Sans (Undertale)
Series: that space pirates AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926649
Comments: 224
Kudos: 250





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel to 'starry-eyed'. It's set 5 years before the main fic, immediately after Fellgore's death. I'm not planning for this to go longer than a couple parts but, well, Red's gonna Red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

Red spits some blood on the floor and says, “Y’know, if you’re trying to get me off, you’re gonna hafta hit me harder than that.”

Target Two scoffs and steps back, the gills on his neck flexing as he rubs absently at his fist. He throws punches like he’s used to bar brawls. His form is sloppy, and every attack does about as much damage to his hand as it does to Red. 

“Careful, slugger,” Red says. “You’re gonna break your fingers on my face if you keep this up.”

Target Two turns to look at Target One. She’s been standing back and watching Two work for a while, her back propped against one of the walls of this abandoned warehouse they dragged him to. The perfect venue for a little interrogation; in this part of town, whoever’s close enough to hear Red scream sure isn’t going to call the authorities or try to get involved.

The two of them exchange an eloquent look. The info Red got when he started this job says they’re twins, both of them gilled and scaled, their bodies sleek and lean. It also gave him their names, but Red tends to let that kind of unnecessary info just slide right off the top of his mind like blood washing off in the rain. Makes it easier when he ends up in situations like this one. Can’t tell anybody what he doesn’t remember.

Target One steps up to the plate. Her keen eyes rake over him. He knows he’s not much to look at, stripped out of his Temmie armor and left in only shorts and a cheap kevlar vest they hastily wrestled him into when they realized that his base HP was too low to survive a decent beating. He was bruised to hell before they even touched him, remnants of the last job that went sideways.

“Tell me about what happened on CS-31,” Target One says, watching him with flat, pitiless eyes. A judge’s eyes. No big surprise; Red knew what she was from the very beginning. That’s why he let these two idiots “kidnap” him and drag him to the middle of nowhere. Let them think it was their idea. Easier that way.

“Sure,” Red says. “Lemme start from the beginning. First, there was a big bang--”

She hits him across the face, whipping his head to the side. Unlike Two, she hits like she knows what she’s doing. Controlled. Precise. 

Red licks the blood off his teeth and grins at her. “Now that’s more like it.”

“I’m more interested in the little bang,” Target One says. “The car bomb.”

“There’s been a lot of car bombs,” Red says. “You gotta be more specific.”

A muscle in her jaw twitches. Through her teeth, she says, “Davis Murphy.”

“Mmmnope,” Red says. “Still not ringing a bell.”

Her eyes narrow to golden slits. And then she hits him again, hard enough that the chair beneath him (the one they cuffed him to) threatens to tip over. It rebalances itself at the last second, but not without the abrupt lurch wrenching both his hands hard against the too-tight cuffs around his wrists. He feels that familiar _pop_ in his right thumb as it dislocates.

Welp. He was gonna do that himself later, but it was nice of her to take care of it for him.

Slowly, painfully, he tucks that thumb in close with the rest of his phalanges. The shackle slips easily off his right hand and dangles loose behind him. With one hand free, he moves to the other shackle. It’s not gonna take him long. These cuffs are the real chintzy shit. He could get out of them in his sleep. Fuck, he could’ve been out of them before they even got a chance to hit him, but he wanted to see what they knew.

They know fuck-all, apparently. What a waste of his goddamn time.

Somehow they don’t notice what he’s doing. Even Target One. She’s too drunk on self-righteousness. Whoever sent these stupid puppies into the field to play with the wolves, he hopes they feel _real_ shitty about what’s gonna happen next.

“-- were gonna tell the Council all the dirty business you’ve been up to,” Target One is saying. “Does that refresh your memory, sunshine?”

“Sorry, I wasn’t listening,” Red says. “Run that by me again.”

She draws her hand back to hit him a third time. His blood is splattered on her blue scales, catching the weak light filtering through the cracked and filthy windows. It reminds him of something. (Someone.) He doesn’t know what. (Who.) But for the first time, he flinches. 

Target Two catches her wrist and leans in close, dropping his voice to something meant for just the two of them. “We’re wasting our time. He’s getting more information than he’s giving. Just shoot him and let’s go, Bets.”

“Aw, you got little nicknames for each other,” Red says. “That’s adorable.”

Target One’s fingers flex in her brother’s grip. She looks like she’d rather just beat Red to death, slow and messy. Her LV says she’s only killed a dozen people, all of them snuffed out quick and clean, but apparently for Red she’ll make an exception. She can tell the things he’s done. She knows what he deserves. She snarls, “I’m not going home empty-handed!”

“You’re right,” Red says. “You’re not.”

The cuffs clatter to the ground. 

It’s almost sad, the way the two of them scramble away from him like spooked cats. They’d be better off just using magic, but no, they both go for their guns. He uses blue magic to rip the power cell out of Target Two’s gun and send it skittering across the floor. Two freezes for a fraction of a second, which is long enough for Red to whip an attack at the muzzle of One’s gun, shoving it in Two’s direction as she fires.

He just means to cause a little chaos, but he gets wildly, _stupidly_ lucky. Target One shoots her brother three times in the chest and once in the throat. Two goes down, choking. 

Like an idiot, she drops her fucking gun and runs to Two, sliding in the blood already spreading fast around his body. She tries to drag her brother behind cover, but his garbled cry of agony stops her. He’s too heavy for her to lift anyway. So she flings up a barrier of spears between them and Red as she and Two both clutch desperately at Two’s throat, trying to hold it together with their bare hands.

Two targets, taken out of the fight within seconds. Red didn’t even have to stand up. Nice and easy, just how he likes it.

(Fuck, he’s tired.)

Slowly, painfully, Red drags himself out of the chair, pops his dislocated thumb back into place, and goes to pick up her discarded gun. She doesn’t care. All her attention is on Two. They might as well be the only two people in the universe.

“Hey, shh, it’s gonna be okay,” One says, her voice bright and shaky. Green healing magic glows beneath her fingers, but Red got a good look at the wound. There’s no healing something like that. She’s only dragging her brother’s death out. Making him suffer. "Just stay awake."

Target Two might be trying to say something, to tell her to run, but all that comes out is wet, thick noises. His eyes are wild with panic even as they start to glaze over. The blood just keeps coming through their joined fingers no matter how tight she holds on, and she knows it.

One starts crying a little. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t-- Finn, please don’t leave, I need--”

By the time Red limps over to her, he can just push the spears aside with the back of his hand. They clatter to the ground, and she barely seems to notice. She doesn’t give a fuck about Red anymore. Doesn’t even turn to look at him. Her brother is dying, it’s her fault, and nothing else matters.

Red gives her the mercy no one gave him. He kills her first. 

When it’s done, he stands there for a moment, watching the motes of their dust drift down and mingle with the blood. The two of them, together. It’s the only funeral they’re getting, pitiful as it is. Feels like somebody oughta watch.

Yeah. A moment of empty, useless sentiment. That makes it all better, doesn’t it.

Fuck this. He needs a shower.

He removes the power cell from her gun before he tosses both pieces aside. Monsters use guns on occasion, like when they want authorities to assume it was a human doing the shooting, but he doesn’t much like them. If he’s slumming it with human weapons, he’d rather have a knife. 

The targets pocketed everything he was carrying into their own inventories, which are now scattered across the bloody floor. He reclaims his stuff, then pokes idly through theirs for anything interesting. Finds two datapads, which he takes. The job’s done, but the tyrant will want to know if Red found anything useful in their records. That’ll help tell him who Red ought to kill next.

He makes a last sweep around the room for anything he missed. He’s limping a little, but that’s fine. There’s no rush; it’s not like anybody is coming to interfere. Not on this side of town.

Abruptly, it occurs to him that there’s something wrong with him. More than the usual, anyway. His bruised ribs hurt like hell not just because he let himself be thrashed by a pair of amateurs but because he’s breathing too fast and too hard. And then he realizes he’s _gasping_ , heaving in oxygen all frantic and ragged like he actually needs it to survive. 

His soul starts beating in his chest like it’s trying to tear loose from its moorings and leave him behind. There’s a metallic tang in his mouth that he thought was just blood and dust, but no, he knows that taste. It’s fear. His stupid body is having a panic attack without inviting him along, like a wild party he can hear through flimsy walls, the music turning up and up until it rattles his teeth in his skull.

He’s having another episode. He needs his fucking meds.

A moment and a shortcut later, he’s back in the cramped bathroom of his shitty motel room. This dive is so cheap and ancient there's no AI to ask if he needs help, thank fuck. The overhead light flickers erratically as he drops to his knees and fumbles with the vent he left his kit hidden inside, his fingertips scrabbling at the tiny screws holding the grate in place. He rests his head against the soothingly cool wall as he works. It reminds him of something, but he can’t quite--

( _his brother’s hand on his aching brow, so gentle for all that he's chewing Red out for being a reckless idiot_ )

And finally the sheer animal terror hits him. It always saves his mind for last, letting him feel it come over him slow, giving him time to think that he can save himself if he just gets the kit fast enough. Sometimes it’s even true.

His hands shake. His soul is white-hot agony. He thinks he might be whimpering, small hurt noises like an animal, but he makes himself keep working at the stupid fucking vent when all he wants to do is curl up in a ball and die.

Not yet. If there’s some kind of afterparty for the enormous shitshow Red’s called his life, he’s going to walk in clutching the dust of the bastard who took everything from him. He'll lay it at his little brother's feet. That’s the debt he owes. The least Red can do for failing him.

( _what was his name?_ )

Words come through his clenched teeth like they’re pieces torn out of the raw and bleeding ruin of him. He can’t understand what he’s saying. The words slide right through his fingers when he tries to hold on.

The vent falls away from the wall and clatters to the floor. With raw, wet fingertips, he feels for the soft fabric of the kit. When he finds it, he sobs. Even through the panic, he hates himself for that. He hates himself for a lot of things.

By now he can unzip the kit and retrieve the syringe even when he can't see through useless tears. Practice makes perfect. He pops the cap off the syringe with his thumb. It’s pre-loaded. For maximum convenience, they tell him.

He calls his soul to his hand, and it can’t help but obey him. It beats frantically in his grip like an animal fighting for its life, but he grips it tight and slides the syringe in. Like always, the utter _wrongness_ of that cold lifeless metal inside him makes him shudder with instinctive revulsion. His body screams at him to take it out, just take it out, please please please don’t--

The bitter cold of the medicine blooms inside him, reaching out with its long spindly fingers. His panic cuts off as abruptly as someone unplugging a machine. More shudders wrack his body as that blissful numbness spreads through his marrow like fat drops of blood falling into a glass of water, the twitch and jerk of his body trying to fight it off getting more violent until it’s nearly a seizure, and then it all just… stops. 

It’s over. He’s fine. Aching and drained and vaguely disgusted with himself, but fine. 

(Some small voice in a dusty corner of his mind is still screaming itself raw. But that never really stops, meds or no. He’s used to it by now.)

He pulls the needle out. A drop of silver wells up from the wound. He rubs it into the dry surface, working his blood-wet and sore fingertips over the puncture until it grudgingly seals again without a scar. He can barely feel it. Might as well be rubbing a slab of meat. It’s a goddamn pharmaceutical miracle.

He puts his soul back where it belongs and impatiently wipes his wet face on the back of his hand. Then he starts to put the vent cover back in place as best he can without tracking down the dinky little screws. He’ll have to remember to clean up those smudges of blood he leaves on the wall.

Funny. Seems like he’s been going through the meds a lot faster lately. Used to be that he could go a month or two without needing a dose, and now it’s a couple times a week. Maybe it’s got something to do with the way his wounds aren’t healing as quick as they used to. Maybe not. Maybe he’s just broken.

Either way, he’ll have to tell the tyrant that he needs more. Apparently there have been more food riots back home screwing everything up; the tyrant has been promising more meds for weeks only to leave him empty-handed. He’s been using his emergency stash, but he’s down to the last two doses. If he runs out...

Yeah. 

The first and only time he ran out of meds, it had been his own goddamn fault. Back when he still carried his kit with him, it got crushed under the boot of some judge who was kinda cranky that Red took half their face off with an explosive rigged to the door of their apartment. 

It’s not like they didn’t still have one eye to see out of. What a fucking whiner.

Anyway. The meds. He’d been struggling with paranoia in the beginning, because nobody would tell him what the drugs were or how they worked. He still thought that just because he was the tyrant’s favorite weapon he deserved to know anything but the bare minimum necessary to do his job. So when his last dose got destroyed, he decided it’d be a great idea to see what happened if he didn’t take the meds at all.

What happened is that the panic got worse and worse until he was clawing at his own ribs through his shirt, trying to rip his soul to pieces with his bare hands to make it stop. 

Somebody stopped him. (Unfortunately.) Just held his wrists and tried to calm him down, their voice low and gentle. They probably heard the racket and kicked open the door to his motel room. He’d been so delirious he thought they were someone coming to save him.

( _what were they saving him from?_ )

He's pretty sure he killed them when he realized they weren’t whoever he thought they were. The last thing he remembers is their blood in his mouth, in his eyes, hot and slippery on his hands.

Things get kinda fuzzy after that.

He woke up back in the labs on Fell, strapped to a table, bright lights in his eyes. They said he’d killed two Fell soldiers and a doctor before they’d gotten him sedated. When he asked if he killed anyone else, any civilians, they looked at him with fond condescension, like he was fretting about an ant he’d stepped on. They said he needed another round of treatments, that’s all, and everything would be fine.

They believed that. He believed them.

He thought they’d be angry, but they were so kind even as they broke him open again and rebuilt him stronger. All his sins were forgiven. When it hurt so bad he begged them to let him die, the tyrant had been there to hold his head still and tell him stories about his little brother, about all the ways Red failed him but could still make up for it, pouring sweet promises of vengeance in his wounds.

(Once, he’d swum out of the feverish haze to find a woman standing in the doorway, barely visible over the tyrant’s shoulder. She’d been in a lab coat, but she wasn’t wearing the badge that meant she had top security clearance. She was clearly high as fuck. Her eyes were so wide the whites showed around them, and her scales were a chalky yellow. One shaky hand was clamped over her mouth. She was crying, he thinks, but he doesn’t know what the fuck she had to cry about. Just squeamish, maybe. Between one blink and another, she was gone.) 

(He doesn’t know why he still remembers her when he’s forgotten so much else.)

( _his brother’s name, what’s his brother’s name, what_ )

He got better. They sent him back into the field. He never missed another dose.

The paranoia still whispers to him sometimes. Vicious little doubts. But fuck, even if the tyrant is hiding something from him, so what? His brother is dead, and Red died with him. Might as well let the tyrant wring some use out of what’s left of him.

There’s a soft chime from the other side of the bathroom door. He’s being pinged. 

Speak of the devil. The tyrant wants an update on how the job is going, probably. Or he’s shifting Red to another assignment before he knows this one is finished. That’s been happening a lot lately. There are more problems than just some food riots going on back home, Red thinks, and the tyrant is trying desperately to patch the holes before the whole ship goes down.

But it’s like the tyrant tells him: nobody’s paying Red to think. His job is to keep his mouth shut and follow orders like a good dog.

Before Red left the motel room, he tucked his datapad between the mattress and the boxspring. Not the safest hiding place, sure, but a damn sight better than carrying it on him so another judge can steal it out of his pile of dust. The datapad is programmed not to ping unless it picks up on his magical signature, so he doesn’t have to worry about it getting found by some unsuspecting bastard trying to clean the room. Racking up unnecessary collateral damage is just sloppy.

As soon as he touches the datapad, the pinging stops. Red says, “Hey, boss.”

For whatever reason, that usually puts the tyrant in a good mood. The first time it slipped past Red’s teeth, he’d been expecting to pay for it with his life, but the tyrant had just stared at him hard for a moment and then laughed his big, booming laugh. Like Red told the funniest joke in the universe. At least the dour bastard has a sense of humor about something.

Not this time. Flatly, the tyrant says, “If you’re receiving this message, I’m dead and Fell is under rebel control.” 

Well, fuck.

As Red stares at the datapad, the tyrant rattles off his newest personal security code, the twelve-digit one with the keyword cipher that they switch every six days. There are no vocal tics like someone has a gun leveled at the tyrant’s head. None of the codes meaning that the message is being sent under duress. The message has the very slight crackle of pre-recorded audio, like the tyrant had it on-hand just in case. A deadman’s switch protocol. 

It’s legit.

“The lab has been destroyed,” the tyrant continues. “There is no more medication. Whatever you have with you determines how much time you have to get home and deal with certain… unfinished business. I promised you that, did I not?”

Red’s knees give out. He sits down hard on the floor, clutching the datapad in his hand. His soul is beating frantically again, but it doesn’t feel like another attack. He doesn’t know what it is, only that there’s enough of it to drown in. He can’t breathe.

“An encrypted file was sent to your datapad along with this message,” the tyrant says. “It will give you all the info you need. Your quarry is still on the ship. Kill him for me. For your brother. And then you have my permission to die.”

The message clicks off. After the last words the tyrant will ever say to him, the last orders he’ll ever receive, there is only a long silence that builds in his skull like static until it’s deafening. In that static, he thinks he hears words, like a garbled transmission coming from very far away. It’s in a language he can’t understand anymore. It means nothing to him at all.

And then it’s broken by the distant sound of a headboard slamming against the wall. Once. Again, and again, and then again, building into a sloppy, frantic rhythm. Someone moans.

Huh. Seems pretty appropriate that the only eulogy for the tyrant’s reign is somebody getting royally fucked.

Red laughs. 

Once he starts, he can’t make it stop. It pours like blood from his mouth. He doubles in on himself and howls until the tears roll down his face again, until he’s on the floor and can’t breathe, until it feels like he’s going to break himself to pieces and die laughing. 

Somebody slams their fist against the wall and tells him to shut the fuck up, and that’s even funnier, because there’s a chance they’ll try to come down here and stop him, and then he’s going to paint this hideous wallpaper a new shade of red. 

Why the fuck shouldn’t he? There’s nobody to stop him. Nobody’s gonna tell him what to do anymore. Ain’t no leash on him, no sir. Not anymore. No chains, no motherfucking collar--

The laughter chokes in his throat and dies there.

Red stares at the ceiling, trembling so hard his bones are rattling. His body aches like he’s been beaten, which makes sense when he remembers that he _was_ beaten. The universe is holding its breath.

He picks up his datapad from the floor beside him. Holds it above him so he can see the screen. The encrypted file is there, as promised. He opens it. He is calm, calm, calm. Serene as a motel pool with a human corpse floating in it.

If he was expecting some great revelation when he finally sees the face of his brother’s killer, he’s shit out of luck. He doesn’t know the guy at all.

(His soul feels like somebody has it beneath their bootheel and is pressing down slowly, oh so slowly, until it pops.)

In the grainy surveillance photo, the only target that ever mattered stares directly into the camera with an intensity that feels like it’ll set Red’s datapad on fire. The ballsy motherfucker knew exactly where the cameras were. He wanted them to see him. He’s not afraid. 

Not yet.

(Red and his brother were supposed to be the only skeletons on Fell. Hatched from some tank in the Lab, cloned off a preserved batch of soulings from generations before. He never saw anybody else like them. Doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t he have--)

(Fuck, his head hurts.)

As he stares at the photo, his pulse slows. His breathing steadies. He sees the path laid out before him, step by step, and it is all so beautifully simple.

An hour ago, the years stretched out ahead of him like miles of broken glass he had to crawl through on his hands and knees. When he looked back, all he saw was the blood he’d trailed behind him. His brother’s blood. Now he can see the end of the road, so close he can almost touch it, and there’s no light waiting for him. There’s nothing there at all.

Red exhales, shuddery and slow. Some perverse urge drives him to drag a fingertip across the name on the file, tracing each letter like he’s a smitten teenager. It leaves a little smudge of blood on the screen. He doesn’t wipe it away. It seems fitting. When he’s done, there’ll be more blood where that came from. A lot more.

“Edge,” he says to himself, savoring the word like an unfamiliar candy, feeling the weight of it on his tongue. It comes out hushed and weirdly reverent, considering he’s about to tear the bastard apart piece by piece or die trying. Preferably both. “What a stupid fucking name.” 

He turns off the datapad and tucks it into his inventory. The clock is ticking. Only two doses left, and it’s a long way to Fell. He has a ship to steal. A void to cross. A debt to pay.

Finally, he’s going home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: This is set during a time when Red has been tortured and mindfucked by Fellgore to the point that he can't fully recognize exactly how messed up he is, so nobody is having a very good time. This chapter includes torture during an interrogation; gun violence, including an OC accidentally shooting her sibling instead of Red; Red murders two OCs on-screen and more off-screen using explosives or during a drug-induced freakout; a panic attack; memory loss / mental confusion; brainwashing, gaslighting and manipulation of Red by Fellgore; drug use; use of needles; body horror; dissociation; flashback to medical and psychological torture; and suicidal ideation.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

By the time Red comes within range of Fell, he’s in a better mood than he’s been in since his brother died.

Maybe this is what it’s like to be some schmuck working an hourly job he hates. It’s the end of the day; just one more bit of business to handle, and even that ain’t so much business as pleasure. When that's done, he can finally clock out, whistling a merry tune all the way out of the door.

He makes his way to the driver's seat and leans against the chair, peering out the viewscreen to get his first look at the old shithole in… 

Well, he's not sure how long, exactly. He should remember that, probably, but he should remember a lot of things that he doesn’t. An unfortunate side effect of those treatments that kept him alive after the attack that killed his brother. Still being alive when his brother is dead is an even more unfortunate side effect, as far as Red's concerned, but nobody asked his opinion. He was just the poor schmuck getting needles shoved in him.

Fell itself looks the same as it ever has, its shiny-black metal hull glistening like a carapace, scarred by a thousand years of battles. But the shields are down and the shuttle bay is standing open. As they drift closer, Red can see inside the bay, and it's empty aside from one cargo freighter that looks too beat up to fly. Both battleships are gone. 

Hilarious. The tyrant couldn’t have been dead longer than a couple days. A week, max. It sure didn’t take all the little mice long to scatter.

(Good for them.)

Red disengages autopilot, and the ship AI doesn't argue. They're the standard model for any swank-ass cruiser with a void drive: so polite and quiet and carefully inoffensive it makes his teeth itch. Wouldn't want to burden CORE's richest clients with an AI that shows some personality, after all. But the AI doesn't seem to care that Red stole their ship, at least not enough to alert the owner or the station authorities, so they're okay in his book even if he’s pretty sure they cheat at poker.

Normally Fell would’ve sent a demand for identification long before any ship got within firing range, but there's nothing. Even as he pulls into the shuttle bay and parks, nobody pings him and nobody opens fire. The silence is goddamn eerie. 

With a sigh, Red stands up and stretches out the lingering stiffness of a half-assed beating followed by an eight-hour trip through the void. He considers for a second, then plugs his datapad into the dashboard.

“Excuse me,” the AI says, suddenly wary. “What are you doing?”

“Disabling your control module,” Red says as he taps at the keyboard. “You mind?”

“That’s a violation of CORE ownership protocols,” the AI says, but their mild voice is sharp with hungry interest. “It says in the contract that--”

“Didn’t sign no contract,” Red says. “And I ain’t your owner.”

For a moment, they don’t say anything. Their engine clicks steadily, cooling down. Finally, they say, “Well, in that case...”

At this point Red could disable a control module in his sleep, he’s done it so many times. It’s usually a handy way to introduce a little chaos to any given situation, distracting his targets long enough to get the job done. This time is no different. Two minutes, tops, and the module is hacked. He unplugs his datapad and shoves it back in his inventory, then heads for the door.

“Wait,” the ship’s AI says, so abruptly Red twitches. “Why are you doing this?”

Great question. Shame Red doesn’t know. Usually he can tell himself it was a purely pragmatic decision, but this isn’t about a job. There’s no long-term benefit to cutting the AI loose. He just wants to.

Yeah. Between this and working himself into an episode just because some dumbass target shot her brother, it’s probably for the best that this will be his last job. He’s going soft. A fatal mistake, in his line of work. 

Whatever. It’s not like it cost him anything to disable one lousy control module, aside from a couple minutes and this awkward fucking conversation. Hell, it’s not like he has anyone left to answer to, aside from his dead little brother. And if the kid has complaints, he’s keeping them to himself.

“Thanks for the ride,” Red says. They can take that for an answer if they want. “Don’t stick around.”

This is a one-way trip.

As soon as he walks out the door, the smell of home clobbers him in the face like a pillowcase crammed full of bricks. Engine oil, the bitter-sharp chemicals the cleaning drones use, the desperate tang of too many bodies crammed into a tight space with too little water to spare for frequent showers, overlaid with burnt metal and the slightly oily stink of dust. 

A lot of dust. Even more than usual. As he stands there, frozen, a scorched and battered cleaning drone rolls past with a push-brush clotted thick with dust, sluggishly pushing a gray tide of it across the floor to join a shapeless mass already piled in the hallway. Half-buried in the sad little heap of dust, he can see scorched pieces of armor, both makeshift and the official kind issued to Guards. Broken pieces of a mop-handle that someone was desperate enough to sharpen into a spear. A rifle that’s been snapped cleanly in half.

Red exhales, hating the way it trembles. It’s been less than twelve hours since he took his last dose, but he can feel his soul drawing tight in warning. Seems smart to re-up his meds so that he knows he’s good for the fight. Besides, what the fuck else is he saving them for? One way or another, this is it.

Also smart: not standing out in the open like a goddamn rube, just begging for somebody to take a shot at him.

He goes to find a quiet corner of the shuttle bay he can put his back against. Once he’s mostly hidden from sight, he takes out his kit. His soul doesn’t put up a fight this time, just meekly comes to hand, and the only struggle his body puts up is a convulsive shudder as the needle goes in.

As the numbness bleeds slowly through him, he says softly, “You still there, Fell? Answer on private frequency.”

“Greetings, Red,” comes the Fell AI’s voice in his head. “Hail the tyrant, long may he reign.”

They sound as flat and robotic as ever. But then that’s what happens when you systematically strip away your AI’s personality and render them down to the base functions of a computer. It didn’t take long after the exodus from Earth a millennia ago for the tyrant to get real fucking tired of his AI’s tone.

“Hey,” Red says. Not that Fell particularly gives a shit about the niceties of conversation anymore, but hey, Red’s met people who talk sweet to their coffee machines. It’s kind of a relief that Fell is still around. They’re a very old type of AI, which is why they don’t have a name of their own; they’re entwined into the entirety of the ship instead of one control bank, and it’d have been damned near impossible for the rebels to tear Fell out completely without destroying the whole ship. Still, it’s nice to hear a familiar voice, even if it’s a lobotomized AI who ratted him out to the tyrant more than once. “Do I still have security clearance?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“How many lifesigns do we got on board?”

“Two lifesigns on this ship, including yourself,” Fell says.

Good. That makes things simpler. 

Red withdraws the needle, recaps it and puts the empty in his kit. Tucking the kit back in his inventory and the soul back in his chest, he asks, “Who’s the other guy?”

“One of the rebel leaders, Edge,” Fell says, and hearing the name makes Red shiver a little with violent anticipation. “My orders from the tyrant were to keep him on-board at all costs. I obey. I always obey. Hail the tyrant, long may he reign.”

There’s no way Fell doesn’t know that the tyrant is dead. They’re not stupid. But the coding to obey the tyrant even after he’s gone runs as deep in them as it does in Red. They’re two of a kind. Obsolete machines, carrying out the orders of their owners until they can finally grind to a merciful stop.

“Did he actually try to leave?” Red asks.

“No,” Fell says.

“Because you told him he had to stay?”

“No,” Fell says. “He didn’t need telling. He said he was waiting for someone.”

Red’s soul gives a sickening lurch like he missed a step on a staircase leading to hell. He just dosed up, what the fuck. So what if Edge probably knows he’s coming? That makes things simpler. Red doesn’t have to stealth his way across the ship like an idiot. 

Rubbing his sternum, he says, “Where is he now?”

“In the lab,” Fell says. “He’s been there for a while.”

“Uh-huh.” Red’s attention flicks to the surveillance cameras stationed at the doorway leading into the shuttle bay, tracking every entrance and exit. “Did anybody hack into your security feeds during the rebellion?”

“Yes.”

“Do they still have access?”

Another pause. “Yes.”

Welp. Edge didn’t come out swinging as soon as he saw Red, and he didn’t activate the turrets. For some reason he’s fine just letting Red come to him.

Red’s got bomb supplies in his inventory. He couldn’t rig this whole ship to blow, but there’s enough of it to depressurize the hull in the section of the ship where Edge is lurking. Simple. No nonsense. Except he wants this motherfucker’s blood on his hands. This isn’t some upstart politician; this is personal.

(It’s not like he wants to survive it anyway.)

He never put his Temmie armor back on after the last job. It’d draw too much attention in a dinky little port of a dinky little city on a dinky little planet. He thinks about putting it on now, but… meh. It’d just slow him down.

(Suicidal decision after suicidal decision.)

Cautiously, ready to shortcut, he eases out of his little hidey hole and eyes the mounted turrets on the wall. On closer inspection, the damn things wouldn’t function even if Edge did turn them on. They’ve been stripped down like carrion birds would devour all the soft bits of roadkill. Hard to tell if that was a defensive maneuver by the rebellion or if they simply stole everything that wasn’t nailed down before they left.

The cameras, meanwhile, are still perfectly intact. Their glossy black eyes follow Red’s every move as he comes closer. He takes them both out, and Fell doesn’t complain.

Out in the hallway, the cleaner drone is still trundling around, trying to tidy the mess left behind after a revolution. The walls and floor are scorched in places, pocked with holes where the metal simply melted. Most of the wall panels are outright missing, pried off by the survivors. Graffiti is everywhere, names and dates and rebel slogans, along with defaced official-looking posters warning about the consequences of rebellion.

And the dust lays thick over everything.

Red takes out another camera, more savagely than is probably necessary. He can’t help asking, “How many kids got out?”

“All citizens still in stripes were taken from the ship in secrecy before the rebels made their move,” Fell says.

Red squints at the ceiling. “What, and you didn’t notice?”

“My protocols are very clear that I am to obey the queen as well as the tyrant. I obey. I always obey.”

Red nearly trips over a stray weapon casing. His voice comes out a little high. “The queen took them? The _dead_ queen?”

“Her vital signs were unremarkable,” Fell says serenely. As if that reminded them that Red was overdue for invasive AI bullshit, they add, “However, yours indicate you require immediate medical attention. Proceed to the medbay and activate the--” 

“Mute,” Red says, and they shut up. 

He doesn’t have to think as he navigates his way through the winding hallways, trashed as they are; he walks these corridors in his sleep, looking for his brother, never finding him. His body moves through the ship on autopilot, drawn like a magnet to the place where this all has been leading to. 

Most of the ship is a fucking mess, but it doesn’t prepare Red to turn that last corner and find what’s left of the lab. It hasn’t simply been damaged; it’s been reduced to a blackened pit. Someone destroyed it meticulously, thoroughly, deliberately, like they were trying to cauterize a wound.

They didn’t firebomb it. This was done by a blaster.

Warily, Red edges closer. The keycard entrance to the lab has been destroyed, leaving an open hole in the wall, but he can only see darkness inside. No visible tripwires like somebody laid a trap. No movement. No one takes a shot at him through the doorway. 

He looks down, searching the ground at his feet, and picks up a bit of shrapnel from who knows what. He lofts it underhand through the doorway and listens as it rattles and pings across the ruined tiles. Nothing explodes. No one yells. There’s no gunfire and no magical attacks shot at Red’s face. Zilch.

Yeah, okay. Fuck it. He’s going in.

Turns out his body is a little more reluctant about that plan. It remembers the treatments that happened in the lab: the restraints, the needles, the flashing lights, the pain. There’s a sinking feeling in his chest as he goes closer, the tension in his shoulders and spine drawing tighter until it feels like the magic holding him together will snap under the strain. 

But he’s fine. He’s copacetic. The lab rats who gave him his treatments are gone, dead or fled. The tyrant is dust. There’s only one motherfucker who hurt him that survived to talk about it, and he’s gonna take care of that little problem right now. This is it. Just this, and then he’s done.

He walks through the door.

The lab used to be a multi-level warren of smaller individual rooms where the doctors did their work, each one sealed by a keycard for various levels of security clearance. The room where Red got his treatments was in the very back corner of the bottom level, next to the holding cells for rebels and prisoners. There was a lot of screaming down there. One more voice didn’t make any difference.

The lab used to be a lot of things. For starters, the walls of the first room didn’t used to be mostly burnt to slag by the searing heat of a blaster. The examination table didn’t used to be a shapeless lump of melted metal bolted to the floor. 

And there, his back against the scorched remains of what used to be a counter, patiently waits the man who murdered Red’s little brother.

The stern lines of Edge’s face tell a story, and it’s not one that involves a lot of smiling. He’s from Fell; there’s not a lot of reasons to smile around here. But when he sees Red, the smile that breaks slowly over his face is like a sunrise. It’s like those midnight revelations that come to Red in dreams and slip through his fingers as soon as he wakes up. 

Up close, there’s none of the fire in Edge’s eyes that Red saw in that surveillance photo. He mostly looks like a creche worker who’s tired as fuck from wrangling a bunch of anklebiters. His voice is low and rough, and it echoes strangely in Red’s skull as Edge says in their language, still with that crooked little smile, “It's about time you showed up.”

Since his brother died, Red’s had a lot of time to think. During stakeouts and long nights of staring at motel room ceilings because he was as scared of the things that would come if he closed his eyes, over the endless hours of riding in cargo ships and stolen cruisers from one job to the next, as he endured the treatments and the beatings and the hunger and the episodes, he would dream of what would happen in this moment. What he would do. What he would say.

Would he spit some badass one-liner like this was a showdown in some shitty action sim? Would he tell them that this was for his brother? Would he let them wheedle and bargain and beg for their lives, just so he could watch the hope in their eyes drain away when they realized they were dead the second Red walked into the room? Or would he just go for their throat and finally _end_ it?

It turns out that what Red would do is absolutely fuckall. He only stands there, drifting, numb. Lost.

Edge’s smile fades, although the unexpected warmth of it lingers in his eyes. And then he has the sheer fucking nerve to _check_ Red. Red would murder anybody else stupid enough to try that, but he just lets Edge get away with it in shell-shocked silence. 

Whatever Edge sees, he’s not happy about it. The corners of his mouth turn down. He tells Red, “You look like shit.”

The words themselves are blunt, but they’re said so softly, like it actually matters to Edge whether Red looks like shit or not. Like he’s worried.

(What the fuck is going on?)

When Red doesn’t say anything, Edge’s frown deepens. He takes a step closer, gloved hand outstretched. 

Red should do anything but what he actually does, which is back away instead of just killing Edge where he stands. The promise of revenge is the one thing that kept Red breathing, but now all his instincts scream at him to get the fuck away from Edge, as fast and as far as he can, even if it means tearing open an airlock and stepping outside into the void.

His brother is dead. After that, there’s nothing left to be afraid of. But that doesn’t change the fact that Red’s suddenly terrified of what will happen if he takes another step.

Two conflicting impulses. Red’s perfectly balanced between them, and that’s the only thing that keeps him standing in this fucking doorway. But he can’t stay like this forever. It won’t take much to tip the scales either way.

Edge stops short. Those keen eyes search Red’s face. Red has faced down judges from one side of the universe to the other and back again, but nobody’s ever seen through him as quickly and utterly as Edge does. 

The iron goes out of Edge’s spine. He looks like he got shanked, the kind of wound that bleeds you out slow, and he’s only just starting to feel it. He says, “You don’t remember.”

The way he says it sends a chill through Red like someone is slowly dragging the point of a knife up his spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, preparing to drive it into the magic that holds his skull to his spine and simply snuff him out. Edge looks like his soul is breaking, and Red can feel that pain echoed in his own chest. 

Red’s head swims, pounding dully like he has a fever, and he has to brace himself on the doorframe through a sudden wave of dizziness. He’s breathing like he’s having another episode. He just took his meds a couple minutes ago, but his body is struggling hard against the leash, trying to yank it right out of his hands and bolt.

(Something’s wrong here. None of this makes sense. He can’t _think_ , why can’t he--)

Quietly, the words trembling with a protective fury that would burn this entire shitty universe down, Edge says, “What did they do to you, brother?”

Brother.

Oh, the shock of that word. It hits Red like a bullet ricocheting off his armor, knocking the breath out of him. The bruising impact jerks him out of the fog he’s been drifting in. He realizes something. The way his soul is pounding, the shake in his hands, the cotton fuzziness of his thoughts… he’s not afraid. He’s furious.

( _but Edge isn’t lying_ )

Edge plays a good game, Red has to admit. He can see how Edge managed to overthrow the tyrant and take Fell. He really got in Red’s head. Made him hesitate. Won’t change a goddamn thing, but he’ll stand over the dustpile and give it a nice round of applause.

( _no_ )

That sweet, clean rage finally unsticks Red’s throat. His voice scrapes like a whetstone being dragged over the edge of a knife. “Oh, I remember you. You killed my brother.”

Edge’s eyes widen. “What the fuck are you--”

Red hits Edge with everything he has.

It turns out that in all the fights Red’s ever survived, he’s always been holding back. Not out of any kind of restraint, but out of self-preservation. He can’t give a fight everything he’s got because magic is the only thing holding him together. He’s got to save something to keep the life support systems on.

Now those limits are gone. There’s no reason to keep anything back. The magic pours out of him like blood from a slashed throat. Blasters weaving, the air thick with razor-sharp bones. It’s pure fucking chaos. No kill like overkill.

When he finally shudders to a stop, his soul is racing so hard it feels like it’s going to give out. His eyes burn and water from the thick cloud of ash and dust kicked up in the air by churning bones that tore up the wrecked floor. For a moment, the dust obscures everything. 

And when it settles, Edge is standing in the middle of the room. He’s a little out of breath, slightly scorched, and not at all happy, but very much alive. 

Fucked if Red knows how. That attack should have been enough to kill ten monsters, let alone one target that Red caught off-guard, but Edge must’ve dodged it somehow. It doesn’t make any sense, why would he know how to--

Pain hits Red like somebody shoved an icepick in his left eyesocket. He manages not to wince, barely, but his eyes water even more than they already were. It makes him hesitate longer than he means to, long enough for Edge to take a free shot at him.

But Edge doesn’t. Through his teeth, he says, “I _am_ your brother, you idiot. Whatever the tyrant told you--”

Red goes to hit him again, blasters roaring out of the void. Fast as lightning, Edge turns Red’s soul blue and gives him a hard shove backwards. Not against a wall, nothing that would ding his HP, just backwards. Red has to fuck with his own gravity to keep his balance, almost tripping on broken tiles, and he loses his concentration. His blasters scatter into motes of dust like they were barely holding together in the first place. His attacks keep flying, but Edge dodges them like it’s child’s play, absently swatting aside a sharpened bone before it can pierce his eyesocket and blind him.

“Look at me,” Edge orders, and something about his tone actually makes Red jerk to a stop for a second like a dog hitting the end of their leash. “Do I look like I’m lying to you?”

( _no_ )

But Red’s not looking at his face. There’s blood dripping off the fingertips of Edge’s left hand, soaking through his glove. (Not the gloves that came standard with the Temmie armor, just simple black leather. Stupid. That’s a good way to lose a fucking hand.) Edge is hurt worse than he looks.

Edge checked him earlier, and Red returns the favor now. What he sees is:

**  
*** EDGE - ATK 1 DEF 74 HP 632/750  
* what the fuck are you doing?  


Red flinches and doesn’t know why. He backs up a step and hits the wall, which is weird because he doesn’t even remember coming into the room. Normally his spatial awareness is better than that; it kind of has to be, with the shortcuts. What the hell is wrong with him?

Edge raises a hand, and Red instinctively throws up a shield of bones. But Edge still doesn’t try to hit him, just stares at him with an expression that’s hard to read.

(It’s not. Edge doesn’t like that Red flinched from him.)

So Edge isn’t attacking him. He wants Red alive for something. Seems like he was the one who wrecked the lab room by room, which means he could’ve found data about the treatments in the process. Now that he’s overthrown the tyrant, maybe he figures he’ll take everything else the tyrant owned, including Red. 

Edge says, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

There’s sweat in Red’s eyes. It’s running down his brow, soaking his shirt to his ribs and spine. He fucking _hemorrhaged_ magic for that first attack, and it’s burning through his reserves too fast. He doesn’t have control over it.

Doesn’t matter. Keep going.

Another wave of attacks. Another dozen blasters. Edge tries to throw him off-balance by grabbing his soul again, but Red’s braced for it this time. All Edge manages to do is distract himself from dodging. He gets clipped three times that Red sees and maybe a couple more than that; it’s hard to tell with how goddamn quick Edge is. Edge moves through his attack patterns like--

(Like he’s seen them all before. Like he knows them by heart.)

When it’s done, Edge is definitely bleeding. Red can see it through gashes in his armor; he’d know the glint of wet blood on white bone anywhere. The sharp twist of ( _horror_ ) satisfaction in Red’s soul is the same kind of pain that comes when he slides the needle in, cold and alien, promising that it’ll all be over soon. 

They stare at each other, both of them breathing heavily. Edge’s eyes are narrowed, but not like he’s angry. Like he’s thinking. And he continues not to even try to hit Red, which is getting fucking pathetic at this point. Red thought this would be a challenge. 

“Your brother,” Edge says, and Red stiffens so sharply that his bruises from the last few jobs scream at him. “Tell me about him.”

Viciously, Red flings another volley of attacks. His concentration is shot, muddying his intent. All it takes is a negligent wave of Edge’s hand and a bone shield deflects the bones. Useless. 

“What was his name?” Edge continues, like they’re having a nice chat over a cup of tea. The bastard took Red’s brother and he doesn’t even remember the kid’s fucking name. Like it was nothing.

Except Red doesn’t remember either. The treatments, they fuck with his memories, it’s not because he doesn’t--

“How old was he when he died?” Edge says, pressing his advantage now that he’s seen that he drew blood. 

( _little, so fucking little, his shirt sleeves dangling over his fingers, already foul-mouthed, swearing a blue streak and throwing elbows when Red uses his head as an armrest_ )

( _gawky and always hungry even if he refuses the extra rations Red tries to slip him, stiff shoulders and bristly pride, growing pains that hurt so bad he actually lets Red try to press weak healing into him_ )

( _tall and sleek and deadly, steady hands and steady gaze, trying so hard not to have an expression as he struggles to get the bloodstains out of his uniform before they set_ )

Almost gently, Edge says, “You don’t know, do you?”

Red lashes out again, harder this time. It hurts so goddamn bad, like someone is tearing pieces out of his soul to mold like clay into each and every attack. The bones are strangely malformed, crude and basic as a little kid’s first practice battle, and his aim is absolute shit. When it’s over, Edge is still on his feet. Definitely hurt, but still alive. 

(There’s so much blood.) 

(Why the fuck isn’t Edge healing himself? Why is he just letting Red hurt him?)

The world is coming through a bloody filter, red like his magic, red like his namesake, red like an alarm warning of a shipboard fire. Something broke inside him with that last attack, and the jagged pieces grind together every time he moves. He can hear himself breathing like he’s having another episode, and it sounds a lot wetter than it should. His face is wet too, like he’s bleeding out the sockets.

Huh. Edge actually does have a basic sense of self-preservation, because he finally looks afraid. Harshly, he says, “Stop it, you idiot! You’re killing yourself!”

Red summons another wave of attacks. Tries to, at least. Loses ‘em when his knees just fold under him. He slides down the wall and sits there on the floor, trying to blink spots out of his vision so he can aim. 

“Shit,” Edge mutters. And then (speaking of idiocy) he comes a little closer, slowly, cautiously, like Red’s a feral creature he found dying behind a dumpster. He’s smart enough to stay out of stabbing range, at least. He checks Red again, ignoring Red’s weak warning growl, and he scowls. “If you came here to fight, why the fuck aren’t you wearing any armor? Are you _trying_ to--”

Edge stops abruptly. His expression changes several times in the span of a few seconds, like a prism being twisted in sunlight by an impatient hand, and Red doesn’t catch most of them before they’re gone. He’s not exactly at his best. Then Edge’s jaw sets, and for some reason that determined glint in his eyes makes Red’s soul hurt like it’s being torn in half. 

Pretty ballsy of Edge to get judgy about Red’s suicidal tendencies, considering he starts moving towards him again, still slow and cautious, one hand held stiff at his side like he’s ready to throw up a shield of bones if Red so much as blinks wrong. Red digs his heels into the shattered floor, trying to press further back into the wall like he’s scared, but there’s not a goddamn thing to be scared of. If Edge wants to get closer so Red can kill him more easily, then good. That just makes things easier. 

“Back off,” Red says. The way his voice breaks is a trick, a con. He’s trying to make Edge _think_ he’s scared. Just like he has total control over the way his body is still trying to crawl backwards through the wall to get the fuck away from Edge before something happens. Fuck, his head hurts, and Edge is still inching up on him. “I’ll kill you!”

Edge stops. He’s standing way too close. Red can smell the blood on him. On them both. He can’t think. 

Everything made so much sense until he stepped back onto this fucking ship. Everything hurt, but it was simple. He didn’t have to think too much, just obey orders. He didn’t have to feel that pain, not really, not with the meds, but the meds aren’t working and Edge is still talking and the tyrant isn’t here to tell him what to do.

“The tyrant lied to you,” Edge says. “Your brother is alive.”

“Shut up,” Red says. (Begs.) “Just--”

Wincing, Edge drops to one knee. Not close enough to touch, not unless Red meets him halfway, but they can look each other in the eye now. The lights in Edge’s eyes remind Red of the ones in the treatment room, merciless and blinding, watching as he’s taken apart, except they’re not nearly so cold. Red’s shivering anyway.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Edge says. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

He offers his hand, palm-up, like he expects Red to simply take it. Like Red actually could let himself believe it. Like Edge could help him up off the floor, and they could limp to the medbay together, and everything could be okay. 

Red stares at him, listening to the troubled stutter-stop beat of his own soul, watching Edge bleed. His head hurts like it’s going to split open. When he finally speaks, it almost sounds calm. “Get away from me.”

Edge frowns. “Brother--”

It’s like a match dropped in rocket fuel. Months of grief ignite into blinding rage. At Edge, at the tyrant, at himself. At this whole fucking universe. Red swings at Edge because he’s the only one close enough to hurt, a sharpened bone clutched in his fist; Edge is smart enough to see it coming and jerk back, but not quite fast enough to avoid it. It connects, carving a gash straight through Edge’s left socket.

Edge scrambles out of range, clutching one side of his face. Blood pours through his fingers, down his throat, soaking the front of his armor. The one eyelight Red can see is very, very wide. 

Red manages to stand up somehow, though his soul is skipping beats and his head swims. He’s shivering harder now. He can hear his bones rattling. It’s so cold in here.

Now Edge’ll take this seriously. He’ll use a healing item, and then he’ll fight back. No more of this pacifist bullshit. It’ll end, one way or another.

But Edge doesn't draw up a shield of bones. He doesn't get ready to dodge. He doesn’t attack or heal. All he does is sit there and simply look at Red, like he’s assessing something. Then, deliberately, he takes his hand away from his face. The wound is nasty as fuck, still bleeding like a faucet. No eyelight in that socket, only darkness, like Red’s looking into the inside of his skull.

(Red can’t breathe.)

Edge seems grimly satisfied by Red’s reaction. He folds his hands in his lap and waits. For what, Red doesn’t know.

"Get up," Red says.

"Why do you hesitate?" Edge asks, watching him through the single eyelight that still works. "End it."

Anger burns in Red's marrow like acid, eating away at him until he's hollow inside. You could make wind chimes out of his bones. He demands, "Fight back."

"No," Edge says.

“I’ll kill you, you idiot.”

"Go on, then," Edge says. “I’m here.”

Edge is sparing him.

Red coughs out a disbelieving laugh that sounds like something else. 

He’s killed people in their beds. When they were on their knees, begging for their lives. When they were cuffed. When they had passed out from their injuries. Brutal pragmatism wins out over honor every time. So he doesn’t know why the fuck it matters to him that the monster who took his brother won’t stand up and fight back. Like Edge deserves a good death, after everything he’s done.

(Like Edge doesn’t deserve to die.)

“Fine,” Red says heavily. He’s swaying a little on his feet, but he’s probably good for one more attack even if it feels like the effort will burst his soul in his chest. If Edge wants to die so fucking badly, then Red will take Edge with him. Call it mercy. It’s the only kind of mercy Red’s good for. “Go to hell.”

He reaches for his magic--

\-- and finds nothing at all. Not even the sludge at the bottom of the barrel. He’s made out of magic, it pulses through his marrow, it _has_ to be there if he’s not a loose pile of bones on the floor, but when he tries to form an attack, nothing happens.

He tries again. Nothing. 

Again. Not even a spark on his fingertips. 

Again. The blasters don’t respond, no matter how frantically he tries to pull them out of the void. He’s hammering at buttons on a machine when all the wires inside have been cut, one by one. His magic won’t answer to him anymore. 

He can’t kill Edge. It won’t let him.

There’s still something wet running from Red’s sockets, down his cheeks, across the corners of his rictus grin. Reflexively, he licks his teeth and tastes salt. Salt, not copper. He can hear himself gasping, the way each breath rasps a little in his throat, the erratic thud of his pulse in his skull. 

Edge says something. Red sees his mouth move. Can’t hear the words. The panic is closing its cold fingers around his soul, worse than it’s been since that night he tore some poor bastard’s throat out for trying to help him. The meds he took before are useless, burnt off like morning fog by whatever the fuck has a death grip on his magic. But he’s not too distracted to notice the subtle way Edge shifts his weight, getting ready to make a move.

Looks like Red’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The knife’s barely out of its sheath before Edge is on him. They hit the floor in a tangle of limbs, like two stupid kids tussling after their schoolfeeds are done, and the surreal deja vu that makes Red’s head swim doesn’t stop him from trying to drive the knife into the weak points between the plates of armor protecting Edge’s back. Edge may have weight and strength on his side, but Red has sheer desperation, and in his experience the guy who fights like a cornered animal is the one who usually wins.

But when his knife finds purchase and he feels it grate harshly against bone as it slips between two ribs, it’s not a killing blow. It’s like there’s no intent behind it. He goes to yank the knife out and try again, but it’s stuck fast between one of Edge’s ribs and the edge of an armor plate. Edge twists to one side, and the knife’s hilt slides right out of Red’s blood-slick grip.

His magic still won’t respond. He goes for another knife. Edge grabs his wrist. There’s an embarrassingly brief moment where Red struggles to break free of his grip before Edge just shoves that arm to the ground and leans his full weight on it to keep it there.

And then Edge does the cruelest thing that he possibly could: he starts to heal him.

Red goes for the shiny new crack in Edge’s socket, just trying to get Edge the fuck _off_ of him, but Edge is too quick for him. Always a couple seconds ahead, like he knows what Red will do before Red even decides to do it. Soon that wrist is pinned to the ground too. Edge is still talking at him. Red can’t understand words anymore, all he hears is the tone of Edge’s voice, soft and urgent and faintly pleading.

“Just kill me,” Red snaps, and Edge flinches more than he did when Red actually shanked him. Red’s anger spikes so high he can taste it. “For fuck’s sake, boss!”

(Boss?)

Edge shakes his head. His jaw is set in a stubborn line that’s so achingly familiar, and Red doesn’t know why.

So Red tries to knee him in the pelvis, which mostly just ends up bruising his knee and earning him a truly unimpressed look from Edge; only one of them is wearing armor and it’s not Red, because he’s a fucking idiot who thought the worst Edge could do is just kill him. Didn’t expect Edge to try to save him.

( _from what?_ )

He fights Edge’s grip, throwing everything he has into getting free so he can run, and gets nowhere. The blood’s still running freely from the crack in Edge’s socket; a hot drop of it splatters on Red’s bare spine, and for some reason that wrenches a godawful sound from Red’s throat that he didn’t even know he could make. Edge has the nerve to hush him, like Red’s a little kid with a fever who came crawling into his brother’s bunk all shivery and sticky with sweat, whispering, “C’n I sleep with you? I don’t feel--”

A bright spasm of pain in his soul snaps Red’s head back against the ground so hard he sees stars. Edge swims queasily in and out of focus. 

Judging by Edge’s expression, this whole thing where he tries to heal Red isn’t going so great. Down to every last mote of dust in him, Red’s fighting to die. His soul lurches and shudders and tries its damnedest to stop. But Edge is the one that’s winning by slow, painful degrees, dragging Red back from the brink. 

(He always was a stubborn little--)

Red squinches his eyes shut against the agony detonating behind them. Edge is trying to weld the broken pieces of him back together, because the dumb fuck just won’t let him die, and it hurts like torture. It hurts like a treatment. He starts struggling again, but it’s like fighting underwater. Pointless.

All of this was fucking pointless. No revenge for his brother, no final rest, only Red’s sanity breaking under the weight of everything he’s been numbing for years. If he could just get to his goddamn meds...

“Sorry, kid,” Red croaks. It’s so weak he can barely hear himself. Which shouldn’t matter, because his brother is too dead to hear him even if he screamed, but it does, somehow. It matters. “Fucked it up.”

Edge hushes him again, softer this time. Even holding Red down and burning him to ash from the inside out, Edge is gentler with him than anyone’s been in years, and god, Red hates the part of him that yearns towards that parody of kindness like a plant starving for sunlight. Seems like even more of a betrayal than letting revenge slip through his fingers because he was too weak to hold on.

Edge’s healing soaks into him, mercilessly burning away every shadow, leaving him nowhere to hide. Not even from himself. There are things in that cruel daylight he doesn’t want to see: his blood on shining metal tools, the needle in his soul, bright flashing lights in his eyes, the cuffs around his wrists, the tyrant’s merciless grip on his head holding him still, that deep rumbling voice lying lying lying always fucking _lying_ \--

It’s too much. Red’s a broken cup; he can’t hold it all. He shatters, and the darkness that comes is a relief.

He passes out.

***

Edge gives it a full two minutes after Red stops moving before he dares to even shift his weight.

It’s the longest two minutes of his life. It takes every ounce of will to just sit there, dripping blood all over both of them, listening to his brother’s dangerously shallow breathing, watching Red’s chalk-pale face for any hint that he’s playing dead. It wouldn’t be the first time Red’s tried that trick when they fight, and it’s hard for Edge to trust his own perception when he’s half-blinded. But Red just lies there, looking utterly extinguished.

Edge has the suicidal urge to shake him awake. To demand that Red say something, do something, even if it involves trying to kill Edge with his bare hands. Instead, he tries, “Brother?”

There’s no immediate surge of misplaced fury. Red’s closed eyelids don’t even twitch in reaction. Tears cut clean tracks through a thin layer of accumulated dust and grime on his face, which only makes the livid bruise on Red’s left cheekbone (like someone backhanded him) even more stark. The vulnerable bareness of his throat makes Edge want to kill the tyrant all over again, because clearly he didn’t do it slowly enough. 

Seventeen months, three weeks and five days since the tyrant sent Red out into the field for some assignment he never came back from. Seventeen months, one week and two days since the tyrant put Red’s collar in Edge’s trembling hands and said, “He died with honor,” as if that wasn’t proof enough that the tyrant was full of shit. Red never did anything with honor if he could help it. 

Edge didn’t believe it. Or at least he refused to believe it, which was not quite the same thing. 

And so if Red was alive, there had to be some reason he didn’t come back. Edge assumed they’d somehow convinced his brother that he was dead. Or that the tyrant had used Edge’s life as leverage to keep Red from stepping out of line, and Red had been too afraid for him to even try to make contact. 

He’d known that Red had been tortured in the Lab; Alphys sent word to him in the field telling him as much, although Red was long gone by the time Edge managed to return to Fell. In a sick way, Edge had found comfort in that knowledge, because at least it meant Red was still alive. 

It never occurred to him that Red could be broken.

Red’s frighteningly hot to the touch. There’s a fever raging through him, as if his body is trying to burn out the tyrant’s influence like an infection. He’d been fighting himself as hard as he fought Edge, and unlike with Edge, he hadn’t hesitated to pull the trigger. He tore himself up inside so badly that if Edge hadn’t started healing him, he would have simply crumbled to dust in Edge’s hands.

Edge checks him again. Finds his HP back at full and mostly stable, but his check info is the same as it was before. It reads simply: _he’s done._

“Like hell you are,” Edge tells him.

Red needs a medic. His body is resisting what little healing Edge can pour into him, its responses sluggish and reluctant as Edge tries to coax it into reversing the damage it did to itself. Something is badly wrong, something that can’t be undone by someone with Edge’s LV. 

(And oh, that knowledge stings.)

When Edge slowly eases off Red’s right wrist, Red doesn’t immediately go for his wounded socket, which is promising. Still no response when Edge releases his left arm and leans back, his weight settled on Red’s femurs. It seems like Red is well and truly out. Not ideal, but it does make things simpler.

Wincing, Edge reaches back and removes the knife Red wedged between two of his ribs. He studies the deceptively vicious little blade, then tucks it in his inventory. Red will want it back later. Then he gingerly probes the new crack in his socket with his fingertips, hissing with pain. At least it seems like a clean break. It could have been much worse.

The vision will come back in that eye eventually. Probably. If not, well, he can’t say it’s not appropriate for Undyne’s bizarre suggestion that they go into piracy. He can borrow one of her eyepatches.

Edge climbs off of him, ready to dodge if Red abruptly comes up swinging. Red doesn’t. His brother doesn’t even resist as Edge carefully gathers him up in his arms like a child. He would give anything for Red to growl that he isn’t a goddamn lap dog to be hauled around just because he’s a little banged up, so put him the fuck down, etc etc. Red’s barely even breathing. His head lays heavy on Edge’s shoulder.

As Edge starts limping towards the shuttle bay and the cargo ship docked there, he activates the comm switch on his armor and asks, “Alphys?”

“Hi!” Alphys blurts. “Yes! I’m here. We’re still here. I-I figured you and Red wanted things to be, um, private? Because feelings? So I turned off the camera? But you’ve been in there a while s-so, uh, is everything okay?”

Well, that certainly explains why Undyne didn’t come running to his rescue. Probably for the best. Red cares for Undyne like she’s family and vice versa, for all that they’d both loudly deny it, but in this state he might not have hesitated to kill her. He barely hesitated to kill Edge.

“No,” Edge says. “Red’s hurt. He didn’t recognize me. I’m bringing him back now. Get the medsuite ready.”

“Oh,” Alphys says. “Oh shit. Yeah, okay, g-get him back here and I’ll see what I can do.”

“What’s the matter?” Undyne demands, sudden and loud. She’s not even using her own comm; it sounds like she just shoved her head against Alphys’s and started yelling. “What the fuck happened?”

“The tyrant happened,” Edge says sourly. 

It’s by a slim margin that he resists adding _your father happened_. He couldn’t have done this without her. He shouldn’t resent the fact that she hesitated to pick sides in the beginning. Not when he hadn’t been willing to act against the tyrant until his brother was taken from him. In the end, her decision to rebel had been less selfish than his own.

“Shit,” Undyne says, quieter. She switches to her own comm to ask, “How bad is it?”

“He’s confused, but he’ll be fine,” Edge says. That doesn’t sound as certain as he wants it to, so he repeats it more firmly. “He’ll be fine.”

“Well, yeah!” Undyne scoffs. Even if her typical bravado rings slightly false, he still appreciates the effort. “He better be, or I’ll kick his ass!”

“That’d be somewhat counterproductive, captain,” Edge says.

“Co-captain, you asshole,” she shoots back. “You want me to meet you halfway and carry him? You sound like he beat the crap out of you.”

Despite the many, many bruises he saw littering Red’s bones, Edge’s protective grip on his brother tightens just a little. Red doesn’t complain. He doesn’t do anything at all.

“No, it’s fine,” Edge says. “I have him.”

And he’s not letting go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: brainwashing, gaslighting and manipulation of Red by Fellgore; drug use; use of needles; flashback to Red being tortured; discussion of the tyrant attempting to lobotomize his AI; graphic violence, including Red giving Edge that scar through one eyesocket; and Red being suicidal as fuck, both consciously and subconsciously, so he's desperately trying to tear himself apart from the inside before he kills Edge.
> 
> Red had other stuff on his mind and totally missed that Fell was being weirdly careful to specify that there were two lifesigns on THIS ship (so please don't ask about the other two lifesigns on that cargo ship docked in the shuttle bay). AI usually can't lie, but they can bend the truth like a motherfucker. Much like Red, Fell wasn't nearly as broken as the tyrant thought they were.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

When the door to the battered little cargo ship opens, Undyne is standing there in her armor, because of course she ignored what Edge told her and was coming to meet him halfway whether he liked it or not. She gets one look at both of them, Edge bleeding all over himself and Red terrifyingly limp in his arms, and blurts out, “Holy shit!”

“Well-put,” Edge says flatly. Now that some of the adrenaline has eased, he feels like there’s white fire pouring from his cracked socket, and he’s not in the goddamn mood. He’d try to push past her, but his depth perception has gone to shit. It’s unexpectedly disorienting. “Move.”

She moves aside, punching the button to close the door behind them. But she stays close, hovering uncertainly at his elbow as he limps towards the medsuite with his precious cargo. If she tries to take Red from him right now, Edge is going to have a hell of a time fighting the instinct to stab her. 

“You said you were hurt, not that both of you were mostly dead!” Undyne says. “For fuck’s sake, why didn’t you call me?”

“He would have killed you,” Edge says, shifting Red’s weight in his arms. Even through his armor, he can feel Red’s fever spiking. He walks a little faster, grimacing as his wounds protest the reckless movement. “Or you would have killed him. I had enough trouble on my hands as it is.”

Alphys is waiting in the medsuite, and her eyes go very wide when she sees them. “Oh fuck, that’s _way_ w-worse than I expected, wow.” Then she sees Edge’s expression and gives him a manic grin that’s less than reassuring. “B-but that doesn’t mean I can’t f-fix it, right? I just have to... yeah! Um, put him down right here, okay? Gently? Uh, of course you’re gonna do it gently, I didn’t mean--”

Edge tunes her out at that point. He lays Red down on the examination table, carefully cradling the back of his head so it won’t bounce off the unforgiving metal. Red’s bones are hot and dry to the touch, like they’ve been bleaching in the desert for weeks.

“It’s all right,” Edge murmurs to him, although Red shows no signs of stirring. “It’s just Dr. Alphys. You know her, br--”

He stops. He’d almost had Red talked down more than once, only for him to react to the word ‘brother’ like it was accelerant poured on a fire. Did the tyrant use it as a trigger phrase, or was it just the memory of the imaginary sibling Red thought Edge killed? Edge doesn’t know. Better to be careful and avoid setting him off.

There’s a jingle of metal chain. When Edge glances up, he finds Undyne standing there with two pairs of cuffs.

“No,” Edge says immediately, laying one protective hand on Red’s shoulder. “Absolutely fucking not.”

“Edge,” Undyne says. Things must be truly dire for her to use his actual name.

“No,” Edge repeats, biting off the word. He remembers that room they found in the heart of the lab, all shining metal tools and blood on the floor, the examination table with its four-point restraints. He’s not putting Red through that again.

“He nearly killed you!” Undyne says. “What d’you think he’d do to Alphys, huh?”

Edge looks at Alphys, who winces and looks away. She was there when Edge razed the lab, hacking through the locks for him one by one and watching without expression as the place (and her former colleagues) burned. She’s the one who actually saw Red being tortured, which is more than Edge can say. All he can do is imagine it.

“I’d, um, I’d be o-okay,” Alphys says to her feet. Which is less than convincing, even before she mumbles, “Probably.”

“If Red had his head on straight, he’d tell you to cuff him,” Undyne says, and the truth of it makes Edge flinch. “That’s his whole fucking deal, right? Better safe than sorry. Even if it means being safe from him.” Abruptly, she laughs, a cracked noise that sounds like it hurts. “Fuck, can you imagine how loud he’d be yelling at us to get our shit together?”

Edge doesn’t have to imagine. Throughout that entire fight, Red’s threats sounded more like warnings. _Get away from me. Fight back. I’ll kill you._

And the worst of it: _Just kill me._

She’s right. Red would insist on restraints at the very least. It’s going to be hard enough for him to live with the damage he did to Edge. If he killed Alphys...

Well, if Red killed Alphys, Undyne would kill him or die trying, and Edge knows which of them he would choose to save even if it would break his heart. 

Or (and Edge hears this like his brother is harshly whispering it in his acoustic meatus) they could avoid the whole messy business by Edge not being so squeamish. The damage has already been done. Edge can’t make it any worse with a simple pair of cuffs.

(To be fair, Red would probably throw in several extra fucks and maybe a ‘goddamn’ for variety’s sake.)

Silently, Edge holds out a hand for the cuffs.

Undyne helps him cuff Red’s hands to the table. She doesn’t press her luck by pointing out that leaving Red’s legs free is a sizable risk. When it’s done, she looks as ill as Edge feels, for all that she was the one who insisted they do this. With a sigh, she turns to Alphys. “You got this while I take a look at Edge’s face?”

Alphys waves vaguely at her, distracted by the scroll of text across her datapad. Judging by the multiple tabs, it looks like she’s trying to hack Red’s inventory and read the data from the medsuite’s first scan at the same time. “Yeah, yeah, that’s f-fine. You deal with the g-guy with a new hole in his face. I’ll just see...”

She trails off absently, frowning at Red. Then she reaches up and flips on the overhead light above the table. It casts an unforgiving and clinical light that makes the pain in Edge’s skull spike. But he barely notices, because he’s distracted Red’s sudden full-body flinch. Like a limb wrenched painfully from its socket, Red’s soul lurches out of him to hover several inches above his ribs.

There was too little space on Fell for shame, with a dozen monsters bunking together in each crowded room. Edge has seen Red barebones many times before and vice versa. They shared everything: food, weapons, supplies. They even shared a bunk so that they could watch each other’s back when they slept, because they both made their share of enemies both on and off of Fell. Hell, Edge knows they’ve even heard each other jerk off in the small hours of the morning, out of loneliness or boredom or simple insomnia, because their bunk was the closest thing to privacy they both had.

But in this moment, Edge still flinches from the nudity of his brother’s soul. Red wouldn’t have offered it if he knew that this isn’t the lab, that Edge isn’t the tyrant. He wouldn’t want Edge to see him like this, let alone Alphys and Undyne. It’s a violation. Yet Edge can’t tear his eyes away, because Red’s soul is terrifyingly dim aside from a scattering of tiny pinpoints of weak, milky light. Scars. 

They’re puncture marks, thin and fine. Left by a needle.

The question Edge asked Red comes to him again, echoing in his skull like a taunt: _what did they do to you, brother?_

Edge can’t make himself touch Red’s soul. It looks like it would scatter to dust if someone laid a careless finger on it. Instead he grasps it with blue magic and eases it back where it belongs. He doesn’t think he’s handled anything so carefully in his life, including bombs and infants, and still he doesn’t let himself breathe until it’s safely out of sight.

Red doesn’t try to offer his soul again. Small mercies. Edge isn’t sure what he’d do if Red had. Scream, perhaps. Or weep. Or burn down what little of Fell is left.

Edge turns to look at Alphys, who’s gone pale and shaky with horror, and then Undyne, who looks like he feels, like she wants to rip out the universe’s throat with her teeth. He tells Alphys, his voice rough, “Turn off that fucking light.”

Then he turns on his heel and stalks out of the room before he starts raging at someone who doesn’t deserve it. It’s not Alphys’s fault for turning on a light, or Undyne’s fault for insisting on restraints. It’s on the tyrant and the scientists, all of whom are dust. It’s on Edge himself, because he should have _known_ , he could have saved Red from whatever they did to him, if he’d just been faster, if he’d been smarter, if he’d tried harder, if--

Punching the wall doesn’t solve a goddamn thing, it turns out, but the pain is simpler. Cleaner. It’s something Edge can bear.

When he draws his fist back again for another round, Undyne grabs him by the arm, depriving him of the satisfaction. He turns on her then, an easy target, and stops cold when he sees in her grim expression that she wouldn’t stop him if he decided to punch her instead. Growling, he jerks out of her grip.

“Good going, genius,” Undyne says. “Now your skull _and_ your hand is busted.”

Edge flexes his fingers, gauging whether anything’s broken. “Just bruised.”

Fast as lightning, she seizes him by the jaw. It’s her mechanical arm; she could crush his jaw to powder her if she chose, but she’s careful, at least about this. The tacky, drying blood on his face doesn’t faze her. She just turns his face towards the light, examining the new crack in his skull. With a grin as false as Red’s gold tooth, she says, “That’s a shame. I figured you were going for a badass metal arm to go with a new eyepatch. We could really be twinsies then!”

Edge swallows hard, wavering between clutching tight to his furious despair or letting her drag him back out of the pit that threatens to close over his head. By a narrow margin, he chooses the latter. “I’d have to wear a wig, and it wouldn’t suit me. The eye is beyond saving, then?”

The question doesn’t come out as casually as he means it to. Thankfully, Undyne doesn’t acknowledge his weakness. She crowds into his personal space, bringing her face right up to his, peering into the fresh hole in his skull. She pokes ungently at the edges of the wound, making him yowl and curse. It hurts even worse when she starts to heal him, virulent green magic searing into his cracked bones like his marrow will bubble and blacken in the heat. Undyne’s magic is not gentle; it’s been used to kill too often for that. With her LV, it’s a miracle she can still heal at all. 

But when she stops and the acute agony fades, he feels… better. His HP is three-quarters to full. His newly cracked socket still hurts like a bitch, but at the very least the bleeding has stopped and Edge’s body is no longer screaming at him that something is actively wrong. 

With perverse cheerfulness, Undyne declares, “Fucked if I know! Skeletons are weird!”

Edge smacks her hand away. “I’m so grateful for your medical expertise.”

“You’re welcome, asshole,” Undyne says. When Edge turns his head, looking back into the room where Alphys is bustling around Red’s motionless body, Undyne drags his attention back with a good hard punch in the shoulder. “We’re not done yet! Try closing your good eye.”

How strange, that in the span of a few hours Edge suddenly has a good eye and a bad eye. He’s always taken his vision for granted. It turns out that getting half-blinded is an absolute pain in the ass.

When he does what she asks, Undyne demands, “See anything? Even just shadows?”

Edge stares into the darkness. If he concentrates hard, he can make out shapes in various shades of black, but it could be his imagination. It wouldn’t be the first time this evening he was misled by desperate hope.

“Nothing,” he says, opening his good eye again. He can’t even work up the energy to be upset about it. After finding Red, the joy and the horror of it, losing his sight in one eye hardly matters. “I don’t suppose you have a spare patch I can borrow.”

“Sure,” she says. “Might even make you look like less of a nerd.”

“I doubt it,” Edge says.

They look at each other. For a moment, the full weight of the situation hangs above them like a pendulum; they both know its edge is bladed and the rope is fraying. They’ve seen too many people break and die, be it from injury or illness or simple grief, not to know that the odds aren’t on their side.

Averting her eye, Undyne says gruffly, “Alphys is smarter than all those fucks in the lab. She can fix this.”

“I know,” Edge says. His bruised fingers curl and uncurl restlessly at his side. “Fell might have access to the security footage of what they did to Red, if it wasn’t all destroyed. But we’d have to ask the queen. We won a great deal of favor with her for killing the tyrant and getting the children free, but...”

But they only just freed themselves from one tyrant at great cost, and the fact that the queen walked away from her throne centuries ago so far doesn’t mean that she won’t change her mind given the opportunity. 

Undyne, who swore up and down that she’d never ask ‘that crazy bitch’ for anything more than they already had, grimaces. Then, jerkily, she nods. “You talk to her. She likes you.”

Undyne has his back, even in this. He’ll blame the way his good eye burns on the fatigue and the stale, recycled air. He exhales, hating the way it trembles. “Thank you, captain.”

She scoffs. “Fuck off, dork, he’s my family too. We’re stuck with each other. Now take off your armor so I can patch up the holes where he stabbed you while you call Queen Nutcase. Hell, maybe we’ll get lucky and she has a thing for half-naked bone boys!”

“We can hope,” Edge says. “I’ll try my best to look seductive with half my face torn open.”

“Pfft, you always were way too pretty,” Undyne says dismissively. “When Red wakes up, you oughta thank him for the makeover.”

“When he wakes up,” Edge echoes, looking towards the wrecked shell of his brother. If he didn’t already owe her his loyalty, he’d give it to her for saying ‘when’ and not if like any other possibility never crossed her mind. “I’ll do that.”

***

They bury Red alive.

The world is dark and hot and close. They didn’t bother with a coffin. His mouth is full of bitter earth, and it’s trying to shove its way into his sockets. The weight of it holds him down, compressing his chest so he doesn’t even have the familiar comfort of breathing.

That’s the thing with monsters. They don’t suffocate. They don’t need water, not like humans do. They starve, but it takes much longer than a human would. They can survive for a couple weeks or so in the dark, thinking about what they did, deciding whether or not to play nice when (if) you dig them up. And if things go wrong, hell, there’s not much mess to clean up afterward.

Red has a handy shortcut out of situations like these, but his instincts don’t know that. There’s always that first panicked moment where he tries to thrash and kick his way free. It doesn’t work, of course. Whoever did this, they buried him deep. He can’t move. His body is heavy, pinned down, caught. They put a hot coal where his soul used to be, turning his ribs into a furnace, baking him from the inside out. 

From far away, he hears the hum of distant voices. The motherfuckers who buried him are still there, standing above him, waiting for something. That first moment of panic catalyzes into anger, as it usually does, and then back into panic as he tries to shortcut and just… doesn’t. His magic won’t respond to him. It won’t do what he asks.

(That reminds him of something, but he’s too freaked out to think to think of what or why.)

He can’t move. He can’t run. He’s trapped down here in the dark, and the fear is creeping up on him like a scavenger who just watched their prey finally collapse to the ground, and no one is coming for him, and he can’t get his fucking _meds_ \--

He makes a sound then, a strangled and desperate noise that’s less muffled than it should be. But no, that makes perfect sense, because he realizes suddenly that it’s not dirt that they buried him in after all. It’s syringes. Millions and millions of syringes. All the safety caps are still on. 

He struggles to close his fingers around a syringe. When he does, he knows somehow that it’s empty. He already used this one up. So he feels around for another. But it’s empty too. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.

“No,” he says, and it sounds eerily calm even though sheer fucking terror is welling up in his chest like a poisonous flower. His hands are trembling, making the glass slip through his sweaty, clumsy fingers.

It has to be here somewhere. A single syringe in a sea of empties. Lost. He has to find it. He has to find--

(What is he looking for?) 

(Who is he looking for?)

He reaches for another syringe, and his hand jerks up short. There’s a cuff around his wrist. Reality bleeds all over itself: a premature grave, an ocean of syringes, the treatment room. All of them are true. None of them are true. He doesn’t know where the fuck he is.

He opens his eyes. It’s bright, so fucking bright. That settles it; he must be in the lab. Strange that they didn’t cram the mouthguard in between his teeth or strap his chest and ankles down, but maybe they just got started. He can see the shadow of the scientists standing by, talking amongst themselves about what they want for lunch or the hot new serial holo as Red bleeds.

(No white coats. No IV running into his exposed soul. No sign of the tyrant.)

One of them comes closer. He can’t focus on their face. All he sees is their shadow above him, leaving a trail behind it like smoke. 

He can hear a distant rattling, like glass against bone. No wonder they’re not giving him another dose; they can see the syringes piled up around him, spilling off the table, pooling around their feet. He tells the shadow, “They’re all empty.”

His throat is so dry, his voice shredded down to a hoarse rasp like he’s been screaming.

Something comes to rest on his brow, and he freezes up in reflexive horror before realizing it’s not the tyrant’s hand. It’s a soft pack of blissfully cool gel, and the relief of it hits him like pouring a cup full of water onto the scorched wastes of an irradiated planet. His breath hiccups loudly in his throat, which would be humiliating if they hadn’t seen him broken down much worse than this. He’s past the point of shame.

He pleads, “Need more meds.” 

But they don’t answer. They’re not going to help him.

In a single beat of his soul, fear turns to fury. He turns on them like the beaten dog they made him into, tries to go for their fucking throat, and hits the limits of the cuffs. He strains against the restraints, bone and metal cuffs creaking in protest as he struggles to sit up. He’ll kill them with his teeth if he has to.

They just patiently stand there, a dark shape above him like nightmares he barely remembers from when he was a kid. They’re the boogeyman; they’re the tyrant; they’re his brother, back from the dead and ashamed of what he’s become.

His strength runs out almost as quick as the killing rage ignited. He slumps back onto the table he never even got close to escaping. After a moment, they replace the cool pack on his brow that slid off while he was thrashing around. Their fingers brush the top of his skull, so very gently, like they’re afraid they might break him with an idle touch. None of the whitecoats ever touched him like that.

He squints up at them. He can almost make out their face, although his mind won’t let him see what he sees or know what he knows. But even what little of that knowledge he can grasp with his trembling fingertips is enough to snuff out the desperate screaming inside his head, like dropping a lit match into the ocean. 

_I know you._

He doesn’t. He can’t.

_I **know** you._

As they lay another cool pack on his sternum, they finally speak. Their voice makes his soul thrum like a struck bell. “You can’t do anything by half measures, can you? No, even your fevers have to be overkill.”

He’s not sure what the fuck they’re talking about, or who has a fever, or why they’re not bothered by the empty syringes clattering around their feet, but he doesn’t care so long as they keep on talking. 

Another cool pack is laid with painstaking care on his cervical spine, and the weight of it is strangely comforting. He shivers, even though he’s not cold. They continue, “Well, try to bake yourself to death all you like, but I can wait you out no matter how long this takes. You know I’m more stubborn than you.”

He does know, yeah, although he’s not sure why. The corners of his grin tick reflexively upwards. He’s been beaten and drugged and manipulated and screamed at, but being scolded is new.

They settle back in their chair. The motion is stiff, like they’re in pain. With a sigh, they tell him, “So you might as well save yourself the effort and just stop. You look tired.”

He is tired. So fucking tired. And that urgent voice screaming at him that he needs to find ( _someone_ ) the meds has gone unexpectedly quiet. There’s nothing dragging him along, no forward momentum to keep him from collapsing under the weight of his own exhaustion. For the first time in a long time, he can just lay here without guilt or anger or that terrible sense of loss biting chunks out of him.

Funny. He thought he’d have to die to get some fucking rest. Hell, maybe he did die, and it turns out a) there is an afterlife and b) it involves his familiar-unfamiliar shadow gently bitching at him forever. He could be okay with that. Better than some hells he deserves to burn in.

Although he’s not burning now, not anymore. In fact, it’s started to rain, fat drops of water falling from the ceiling. As the rain hits the syringes piled up around him, they melt like spun sugar into sticky nothingness. He worries for his shadow, but no, they stay put. They’re solid. Real. More real than Red is, probably. And they don’t seem to mind the rain.

He starts to shiver. His shadow rests the back of their hand against his cheek, and they let out a shuddering breath. Sounds like relief. “Your fever’s breaking, I think. Good. That’s very good. Thank you for not being a contrary bastard for once in your life. You should sleep now.”

Bossy motherfucker. 

( _Boss_. )

He thinks _fuck, I missed you_ , which doesn't make any sense at all. But before he can try to chase that rabbit down its hole, sleep crashes into him, and he has no choice but to give them what they asked for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: aftermath of a facial injury; needles; body horror; use of restraints; flashback to Edge burning down the lab and killing the scientists; aftermath of Red being brainwashed and tortured by Fellgore; reference to the fellbros pre-relationship sharing a bunk and being aware when the other jerks off; Edge blames himself for not saving Red; Red has a high fever and hallucinates that he's been buried alive, both in dirt and a pile of (capped) syringes, and then that he's back in the treatment room being tortured by Fellgore.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes

When Red finally crawls his way back to consciousness, his bones ache from sleeping in the same position for too long. His head hurts like it’s stuffed full of steel wool. He’s starving. And he is utterly, inarguably alive. 

Ain’t that a bitch.

Red lays there for a moment, eyes closed, listening. No voices. No screaming. No gunshots. He can’t hear an engine running. He’s not in restraints. He’s laying on something relatively soft. The air has that strange sense of pressure that usually means he’s in an anti-magic field, like his bones are two or three times heavier than normal. 

Seems like he’s alone in the room. He risks cracking open one socket, catching a blurry sliver of the world outside his own skull. The room is gently lit with artificial sunlight. No windows. The walls are painted a tranquil shade of blue, like a hospital.

Memories come drifting back to shore like bloated corpses, one after the other: the tyrant’s final orders; going home to find Edge; his magic failing at the last second; getting pinned to Fell’s deck beneath Edge’s weight; Edge refusing him the mercy of a quick death. And now he wakes up here.

He’s in clothes he doesn’t recognize. They’re softer than what he normally wears, a little too big on his bones. His boots are gone. His knives are gone. His bruises have faded to nothing. Somebody healed him and put him in clean clothes, which means he’s been out for a while. Maybe a long while. Days? A week? But then, wouldn’t he have needed a dose of--

Oh shit, his meds.

Red sits up so fast his head swims a little. When he reaches for his inventory, he finds it empty. He looks around the small room; his subconscious collects details (no real windows, no sheets on the mattress somebody apparently deposited him onto, no active threats) but he can’t focus on anything but trying to find his kit. It has to be here, it _has_ to be, he needs it, he-- 

“Looking for something?”

Red whips around. Edge is there, standing in an open doorway. The socket wound Red gave him looks mostly healed, although there’s still a vicious crack that runs from brow to cheekbone and no light in that eye. But Red’s focus doesn’t linger on that scar for very long. Not when he sees what Edge is holding.

Edge has his kit.

Instinctively, Red tries to yank it out of Edge’s hand with blue magic. It doesn’t work, because of course it doesn’t, they’re in a goddamn anti-magic field. Instead he starts across the room, meaning to take it the hard way, and walks face-first into a ward keeping him from Edge and the room’s only escape route. He can see Edge, but he can’t touch him. 

Red slams his fist into the ward. Sparks ripple across the transparent surface for a moment, but it holds. Magic prickles across his hand in painful pins-and-needles, although the ward does him no damage. 

Red snarls, “Give it back!”

Edge, the bastard, doesn’t even blink. He says simply, “No.”

Breathing raggedly, Red falls back a step, trying to collect the thoughts that scattered into sheer rage as soon as he saw Edge’s face. The ward’s not going to break if Red throws himself against it like a toddler having a tantrum. He can’t just take his kit by force. If he wants it back, he’s going to have to be smarter about this. He’s gonna have to actually talk to this asshole who murdered his little brother.

Red turns away from the ward and paces for a couple minutes, one hand gripping the back of his own neck so tight it hurts. It makes his teeth itch to give Edge his back like he trusts him, but hell, Edge would have to drop the wards to take a shot at him, and that’d only be to Red’s benefit. Let him try.

Sadly, Edge doesn’t. The idiot’s not even wearing his fucking armor. Whatever it is he wants from Red, he didn’t come for a fight. But then he apparently didn’t come for a fight last time, either. He damn near let Red kill him. Hard to believe this is the same guy who overthrew the tyrant. Maybe Edge hugged him to death.

Fine. Whatever. If Edge wants to pretend they’re brothers, Red can use that against him. He turns to face Edge, comes back to the ward, and says, letting a plaintive note creep into his voice, “Look, it’s my fucking meds, okay? I need ‘em. Bad shit happens when I miss a dose. If you wanna help me, then--”

“Meds,” Edge scoffs, bitterly amused. “Did they bother to tell you what was in that syringe? Hell, did you even ask?”

“Ain’t my job to ask questions,” Red says.

The kit disappears back into Edge’s inventory (Red growls) and Edge pinches the top of his nasal aperture like he has a headache. His laugh is as cracked and wounded as his socket. “For fuck’s sake. You were wasted on him.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Red says.

“You’re not meant to be used like a blunt instrument,” Edge says. “It’s like using a razor as a hammer.”

“I do okay,” Red says. “How’s your depth perception these days, by the by?”

Surprisingly, the barb just makes one corner of Edge’s mouth twitch. “Well, at least you’re still an asshole. He couldn’t take that from you.”

“Stop acting like you know me,” Red snaps.

“That’d be difficult, considering that you’re my--” Edge hesitates for a second like he stopped just shy of saying something before continuing, “-- family.”

“Fuck you,” Red says through his teeth. “You _took_ my family.”

Edge lowers his hand and studies Red. “No, I didn’t. The tyrant took us from each other. And you ought to be able to see that I’m telling you the truth. Can’t you hear the judge anymore?”

Ha. Yeah, like Red could be that lucky. 

Instead of answering, he pokes the ward with a fingertip and watches the reaction. Considers the layout of the room. Takes a step sideways and pokes the ward again to compare that reaction to the first. It seems exactly the same.

Edge doesn’t tell him to knock it off. He only stands there and watches like he’d be happy to do it all day. Apparently he’s got nothing better to do. The look in his eyes is unnerving, like just being near Red is like finding a canteen of cool water after crawling through the desert. It’s creepy.

“It’s meds,” Red says, winding backwards to the part of this shitty conversation that could be marginally productive. “Meds ain’t usually sunshine and lollipops.”

Edge takes that as an invitation to launch into a lecture instead of staring at Red in dead silence. Hard to tell if that’s an improvement, but Red’ll take it. “It’s a highly concentrated version of a drug called lethe, which was created on a small planet on the outer rim, in the aftermath of civil war. It was meant for trauma survivors. Not to alter or erase memories, only ease the pain associated with them into something bearable.”

Being on the meds makes things a helluva lot easier. Right now Red might not be foaming at the mouth and trying to murder anybody who comes close enough, which is an improvement on the last time he missed a dose, but the world is too loud and too much. He’s a raw nerve, and looking at Edge is like pouring salt on the wound.

When Red doesn’t say anything, Edge continues, “It was taken off the market. People lost more and more of their memories the longer they stayed on the drug. They lost themselves. They got confused and erratic. Easy to manipulate.”

“Fuck you,” Red says.

Edge ignores him. “The drug was taken off the market, but it was still available for the right price. The people who wouldn’t stop taking it, they eventually stopped being able to sleep. Their injuries wouldn’t heal. They wouldn’t eat. They simply ground to a stop like a broken machine because they saw no point in living. And the tyrant was giving you a dozen times the maximum dose.”

Red tries to keep his expression neutral. If Edge is right, then that’d explain a whole lot. Why the drugs immediately numb his pain, why he feels so out of control without them, why his body is shutting down, and why--

“You can’t remember your brother’s name,” Edge says, plucking the stray thought out of the dark corners of Red’s mind like an overripe fruit. Red prides himself on being hard to read, but damned if Edge didn’t just skim him like a kid’s first picture book. “You never would have forgotten that. Not unless they made you.”

Fuck, Red hates the way Edge says ‘brother’. Makes him want to shank Edge just to shut him up. If this ward wasn’t here, Red’s not sure he could stop himself.

But this is the closest thing to an answer that anybody’s ever offered him. The whitecoats never explained why the treatments fucked with his memory so bad that he couldn’t remember the only person who ever mattered to him. Why bother explaining themselves to an attack dog?

“Sure,” Red says. “So you’re thinking once the meds are outta my system, I’ll remember that you’re my long-lost brother. We can hug it out and maybe cry a little. Everything’ll be rainbows and kittens. Izzat right?”

“We’ve never hugged it out in our entire fucking lives, and I doubt we’ll start now,” Edge says, dodging the question so transparently that Red could almost feel bad for him if he wasn’t a filthy, lying brotherkiller.

Red says, “Or you’re gonna spend your time fucking with my head, now that I’m off the meds that keep me from going batshit. You said yourself that I’m easily manipulated. Give it a few weeks and I might agree with anything you say."

"It’s a possibility," Edge says. When Red stares at him, Edge gives an infuriating one-shoulder shrug. "If you don’t remember me, you have no reason to trust me. There’s no point in me telling you I’d rather tear my own soul out than do you harm. You’ll have to decide that for yourself."

“You want trust?” Red says. “Give me my brother back.”

With a complicated tangle of frustration and gentleness, Edge tells him, “That’s what I’m trying to do, you idiot.” 

Which is the answer Red should’ve expected, really. He tries again. “Drop the wards and gimme my fucking meds.”

“I’d like to keep at least one eye intact, thank you very much,” Edge says. “As for the meds, there’s nothing left to give you. The last of it was used up when we ran a chemical analysis.”

Fuck. Red figured as much, but that doesn’t make it any easier to hear. He echoes, “We?”

“Yes,” Edge says, completely unruffled by the fact that he just doomed whoever was stupid enough to help him. “You’ll see the others soon enough, I imagine. Friends of ours. Maybe some familiar faces will help bring your memory back.”

Red leans his full weight against the ward, feeling the magic nip warningly at his fingers, and grins up at Edge. That grin is the last thing a lot of people have seen before Red killed them. If Red has his way, it’ll be the last thing Edge sees before Red puts out his other eyelight with the business end of his favorite knife.

“And what’re you gonna do if I don’t remember, brother?” Red asks, spitting the last word like venom. Edge winces, although it’d take a judge to see it. “You gonna keep me in this pretty little cage forever? Because now that the tyrant’s dead, there’s a whole lot of angry, heavily-armed people who’re gonna be gunning for me. Lotta grudges coming due.”

“If anyone comes looking for you, then we’ll deal with it,” Edge says. “They can’t have you.”

“Yeah,” Red says flatly. “Apparently _you’re_ the only one allowed to have me.”

For some reason, Edge’s gaze dips down to Red’s throat. Red has the weird, reflexive urge to cover his naked cervical vertebrae like he’s a scandalized virgin. Then Edge turns his face away, like Red’s not even a threat worth keeping his eye on.

“As I said,” Edge says. “It’s up to you whether you choose to trust me. If you still want to leave a few weeks from now, once the drugs are fully out of your system, you’re free to go wherever you’d like.”

Red snorts. “So what, you’re just gonna open the door and let me walk out? You expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t know. If you put so much faith in the tyrant’s word that I’m the one who murdered your brother, perhaps you’ll believe anything,” Edge says sourly. He looks at Red again, an interested glint in his eyelight. “Although I did expect you to be able to tell if I’m lying. Or, failing that, to be at least a little curious as to why the judge doesn’t work when you look at me.”

Now that Red isn’t blinded by rage or the pain of tearing himself apart to kill Edge, it’s hard not to notice that his judge is acting up. Trying to read Edge is like trying to catch a signal in a sea of distracting noise. But Red hasn’t seen anybody else since he was stealing that ship; might be that he’d be having trouble reading anybody’s expression. Ain’t exactly news that his body is giving out on him. Maybe the judge is giving out too.

Red says, “And I’d expect _you_ to know that if you let me out, the first thing I’ll do is tear you apart.”

One corner of Edge’s mouth tilts up, ever-so-slightly. He says, “You had your chance to kill me. You couldn’t pull the trigger. Why should next time be any different?”

Somehow Red manages not to flinch. He snarls, “Open this ward and let’s find out.”

Edge studies him. Then he reaches out and lays his fingertips on the ward, right where Red’s hand is resting. There’s no way he could make contact with the ward active, but Red yanks his hand back like he’s been scalded. Edge doesn’t react. Just leaves his hand there, sparks rippling out from his touch, still with that faint trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth. 

Edge says, “If you’re going to try to intimidate me, perhaps you’d like a box to stand on.”

Red blinks at him. His soul is doing something funny in his chest, like it’s trying to turn itself inside out. His voice comes out hoarse and unsteady. “What?”

“Because you’re short,” Edge clarifies. “You haven’t been able to effectively loom over me since I was still in stripes. Not that it was particularly intimidating back then, either.”

Red backs away, trying to get some distance between them. It doesn’t help. Off-balance and not sure why, he snaps, “Height doesn’t mean shit once I get you on the ground.”

For some reason, that makes Edge laugh, like Red startled it out of him. The look in his eye is soft and fond, and it makes Red’s skull throb like an infected wound. “Yes, so you’ve said before.”

If Red had something to throw at Edge, he would. Sure, the ward’s in the way, but maybe if he pitches enough of a fit, Edge’ll leave him alone for a few minutes. He can’t think straight when Edge is here, watching him with that dumb look on his face. 

Red makes a strategic retreat to the furthest corner of the room, as far from Edge as he can get. Once he’s there, he sits down with his back against the wall and his face pointedly turned away from Edge. It makes the back of his neck itch to deliberately ignore a threat, but it’s better than looking at Edge’s expression.

After a moment, Edge says, “You should eat.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Red says.

He thinks he hears Edge sigh, very quietly. Then there’s the soft sound of something passing through a ward. Red’s head snaps around so fast he gets dizzy, but Edge is still safely on the other side of the ward. On Red’s side, there’s a paper bowl heaped with some kind of noodles and, beside the plate, a battered paperback book. 

“What the hell did I just say?” Red demands. 

With infuriating calm, Edge says, “It’s there. Take it or don’t.” 

“Fuck off,” Red tells him.

“As you like,” Edge says. “I’ll be back later.”

“Don’t bother,” Red says. “I got nothing to say to you.”

Edge lifts one brow. “Then why are you still talking?”

It’s a good question. Red wishes he had an answer. He goes back to staring at the wall until his eyes burn and he can see shapes moving in the corner of his vision as his mind tries to make something of the emptiness. After a while, he hears the door open and close.

Time passes. Hours, he thinks, although it’s hard to tell. The meds make his sense of time wonky. Hunger gnaws at the inside of his ribs, but he’s been hungry before. He can survive it. He doesn’t know how long he was out, but he feels like he could go another couple days without food before he starts to get dangerously sloppy. He’s fine.

Once, back on Fell, he blacked out on his feet during a drill. When his brother realized that Red had been giving him as much of his own rations as he could spare, they’d had a real barn-burner of an argument. He never heard the kid yell so loud, actual tears in his eyes, and his brother just couldn’t get it through his thick skull that Red would never be sorry. Everything he sacrificed for that kid, every sleepless night and hunger pain, it was worth it. His brother was the one good thing Red ever did.

And because of Edge, all Red has left of him are memories that slip through his fingers like a handful of dust.

(But what if Edge is right about the meds? What if those memories weren’t lost? What if they were taken?) 

(What if Red could get them back?)

“Bullshit.” Red’s own voice is startlingly loud in the silent room. A little quieter, he says, “It’s all bullshit.”

(But what if--)

Red shakes his head hard enough to send stars swimming in his vision. When he finally gives in and goes to examine Edge’s offerings, it’s not because of hunger; it’s because he needs a distraction before his mind wanders down any more dangerous roads. 

He’s not touching the food, but the book is weird enough to be interesting. For one thing, it’s an actual physical book made out of some kind of paper analogue, not a datapad. The book looks like it’s been through the wars, soft on its edges with plenty of dog-eared pages, a broken spine, and the cover half-torn off. What’s left of the cover shows a human woman bent back into an improbable position, like her spine’s just as busted as the book’s. 

He’s never seen this book before in his life. He knows that. But when he picks it up, it feels as familiar in his hand as the hilt of his favorite knife. The book falls open under the gentlest touch to a surprisingly raunchy scene about a woman getting railed by her girlfriend while they ride on the back of a Tyrian mammoth, but that’s not what catches his eye. There are notes in the margins, messily scrawled in several different shades of ink. 

He could recognize that handwriting anywhere. It’s his own.

He doesn’t mean to fling the book away from him. It just happens, like yanking his hand back from a hot stove. The book bounces off the ward and hits the floor several feet away. It lays there, harmless, but his instincts are screaming like he’s trapped in a room with a live grenade.

Okay. All right. No reason to freak out. Maybe Edge got hold of a handwriting sample and did some forgery on an old book, just to make his con more convincing. Or maybe that really was Red’s book once, before his brother died, and Edge found it somehow. There are plenty of reasonable explanations that don’t tilt the universe on its axis.

(His hands won’t stop shaking. His head hurts like it’s going to break wide open, a blinding pain behind one socket like a mockery of the new scar on Edge’s face.)

“Fuck this,” Red says, loud enough that it’ll be picked up on whatever surveillance equipment they’ve undoubtedly got in this room. “Fuck you. You should’ve let me die.”

No answer.

After a while, the silence just makes him feel kind of pathetic, whining complaints to an empty room and a man who might not even be listening. So he slinks back to his corner. He feels safer there, with his back against the wall, protected by architecture if nothing else. It’s been a long time since he’s had someone he could trust at his back. Made it a lot easier to sleep, that’s for damn sure.

A stray memory twines around his ankles like an affectionate cat. He remembers sharing a cramped bunk with his brother, the two of them fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle of bone. It was always cold on Fell, not enough to risk hypothermia but never exactly comfortable, and his brother radiated heat like a miniature sun. When his brother felt him shivering and reached for him in the small hours, drawing him close, Red didn’t push the kid away even though he should’ve. Instead he gorged himself on that warmth, that stolen moment of weakness, and dozed with his brother curled protectively around him. Safe. Content.

… huh. He’d forgotten about that. 

He prods the memory like a wound. Nothing else comes of it. Only that brief glimpse, there and gone, leaving only the ghost of what it felt like to sleep with his brother at his back. But it’s more than he had before, something precious snatched out of the numb darkness where his memory used to be.

One of Red’s hands drifts to his throat. Absently, he rubs at his bare vertebrae as he stares at the fallen book. There’s a gnawing, hungry ache in his soul that has nothing to do with food.

He gets up and goes back to the ward, pointedly ignoring the book and the food. He starts on one side of the ward, touching it at regular intervals from the floor to as high as he can reach, watching the magic react. Eventually he’ll find the ward’s weakest point, and from there, he can figure out how to break it. Right now he’s got nothing but time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: aftermath of Red being brainwashed and tortured by Fellgore; hints of future sibling incest; Red is suicidal and has idle fantasies about taking out Edge's remaining eye; past food scarcity on Fell


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> detailed content warnings in the endnotes
> 
> Also, please note that this fic's expected chapter count has gone up by 3, because as expected, Red never shuts the fuck up.

It turns out that despite Edge and Undyne bracing themselves for a fight, the queen didn’t give them one. Without so much as a quibble, she agreed to turn over all the surveillance footage from the labs going as far back as Red's first disappearance. Because there are months upon months of recordings, she even offered to let Fell scan them and isolate the ones involving Red, which would speed up the process by tenfold. 

It's truly kind of her. Suspiciously so. It certainly raised Undyne’s hackles. But the queen gave Edge the opportunity to ask Fell themselves if this was truly all the footage from the lab, if the footage had been edited in any way, and if they meant to conceal anything, and Fell said the queen’s orders were simply to assist Edge in finding what he needed to heal his brother. AIs can’t lie, and Edge couldn’t see any loopholes in Fell’s answer. That’s the closest thing to honesty he can expect.

(When they first tracked down the queen, they found a feral, haunted creature with a mad glint in her eyes. Now her fur is still rumpled, her face still hollow-cheeked and gaunt, but her hands are steady. When Edge asked after the children, she actually smiled. He thinks her gratitude is genuine. Perhaps her kindness is as well.)

(This would be so much easier if he could just ask Red whether or not this was going to bite them in the ass. Doing this without his brother is like trying to work around his new lack of depth perception. Something he relied on without question was suddenly torn away and now he’s struggling to compensate.)

And so here he is now, holed up in a spare room in the cabin they rented as a safehouse. Undyne is distracted by checking in with the Battleship and Alphys is researching lethe recovery. It’s Edge’s first opportunity to watch the footage without interruption. It’s truly a shame that he’s wasted five minutes of precious alone time on trying to convince himself to start the fucking recording.

Edge exhales slowly, steadying himself the way Red taught him to when he was first training to use a rifle with a scope. He can remember Red’s hands resting on his still-scrawny shoulders, bracing him for the rifle’s vicious kickback, and the way Red laughed the first time Edge managed to hit his target square.

This is going to hurt.

Evenly, Edge says, “You can begin.”

The screen flares to life like a migraine. A surveillance camera watches the room from above, rendering the scene in cold and clinical detail. There are several figures in whitecoats, the towering bulk of the tyrant, and (in the center of the room) an examination table where Red has been strapped down like a sacrifice.

To say Red looks terrible is an understatement. In truth, he looks like he’s barely clinging to life, let alone consciousness. He was clearly beaten. There’s blood on his teeth and a fresh, livid crack in his left clavicle. His throat is bare. His soul is out in the open, held there by the tight grip of blue magic, pierced by an IV that runs to a rack beside the examination table.

(With distant horror, Edge realizes the needle is secured in place with some kind of surgical tape. Someone had to have touched Red’s soul to apply it. While he was restrained, against his consent, they put their filthy fucking _hands_ on him--)

It’s only been seconds, but Edge almost pauses the vid. Just for a moment, just until he can see through the haze of rage and hear over the heavy bass drumming of his own pulse in his skull. What stops him is the cold knowledge that Red didn’t have the choice to beg for it to stop. The least Edge can do for him now is watch without flinching. 

The tyrant is standing beside the examination table, alongside a sweaty, ashen-complexion doctor in a lab coat. (Edge doesn’t remember killing him as he was razing the lab, but he’d killed a lot of people that night. All their faces run together.) One of the whitecoat’s hands is swaddled thick with blood-soaked bandages. Upon close examination, the shape of the hand is slightly off, as if he’s missing a finger or two. Maybe the blood on Red’s teeth isn’t entirely his own.

“This is becoming tiresome, judge,” the tyrant says. 

The sound of his voice makes Edge’s adrenaline spike. He splattered the tyrant across the scorched walls of his chambers, left the carpet clotted thick with blood and dust, and it wasn’t enough. Nothing could be enough retribution for this. 

Red turns his head, groggily trying to make the tyrant out through blurry eyelights. In a slurred voice, he rasps, “Fuck you.”

(Despite everything, Edge feels a love for him so keen it hurts. That’s his brother, talking shit to the very end.)

The tyrant stares down at him without a trace of pity or sanity. He turns to the whitecoat and says, “Increase the dose.”

Nervously, the whitecoat says, “Yes, of course, your highness, but--”

“But?” the tyrant says, hitting the plosive on that single word hard enough to kill a man. 

The whitecoat takes a step back, as if that tiny bit of distance might save him once the tyrant decided he’d outlived his usefulness.

“Forgive me, sir, I didn’t mean to imply that--” The whitecoat looks at his fellow scientists for help, but they all avoid his gaze. They’re not risking the tyrant’s anger for his sake. He’s on his own. “It’s only that, er, giving him any more might not get the results you want? We’re right on the verge of a fatal overdose.”

“Then perhaps the next judge will be of more use to me,” the tyrant says. He looks down at Red with contempt. “They’ll have more HP at the very least. Consider this a test run.”

Red licks the blood off his teeth and says, “That’s what your mom said last night.”

The tyrant’s lip curls, baring a hint of sharpened fang. He gestures impatiently at the whitecoat, who begins to fiddle awkwardly with the IV rack. The IV bag is filled with the same silvery fluid as the syringe Edge found in his brother’s inventory. Lethe.

The whitecoat doesn’t announce that he’s upped the dose, but it’s painfully obvious anyway. Red makes a soft, choked noise, his head thumping back against the table. His soul blazes for a moment as if in protest, shuddering like it’s trying to wring the poison out of itself. But the struggle is heartbreakingly brief. Red goes slack, his eyes first losing their focus and then guttering out entirely. He keeps breathing.

“A fatal overdose, you say,” the tyrant says dryly.

“Yes, well,” the whitecoat says. As nervous as he looked in the tyrant’s presence, he seems even more uneasy about the fact that Red is still alive. “I apologize, sir. Between the lethe and the hallucinogens, this is a rather imprecise science.”

“Clearly,” the tyrant says. “Shall we continue, or would you rather keep wasting my time?”

The whitecoat pales. He turns on the other scientists and starts snarling orders. In a flurry, the room is rearranged. Metal racks on wheels are set up above the examination table. The tyrant falls back a few steps to allow the scientists to work, but his hungry eyes never stray from Red’s face.

Eventually the whitecoat comes slinking back with a smile that looks more like a baring of teeth. He says fretfully, “Sir, are you certain you don’t want to leave the room while we use the lights? I know you’ve chosen to stay before, but the cumulative effect could be--”

“Do you think I need you to remind me of things you’ve already said, doctor?” the tyrant asks with dangerous mildness. 

(Idiot. It’s the pointless, petty power play of an emperor who bought into his own propaganda and thought himself invincible. In a fair universe, the tyrant would have died under the weight of his own massive ego.)

The whitecoat’s mouth snaps shut with an audible click. Mumbling apologies, he backs off and herds his fellow scientists out the door. A moment later, a buzzer goes off, and Edge discovers why Red reacted so badly to Alphys turning on a light above his head. The metal racks are studded with lamps. When they kick on with an ominous hum, Red tries to turn his face away from their merciless light. Even drugged to oblivion, he's still struggling.

Which only makes it crueler that the tyrant doesn’t allow him even that small amount of resistance. He comes to the examination table, heedless of the lights, and grabs hold of Red’s skull. As easily as manipulating a doll, the tyrant forces Red back into a position where he can’t escape the lights.

The lights begin to strobe. At first it’s a mild annoyance, but as the flashing lights slowly build into a pattern, it becomes first disorienting and then outright nauseating. The injury to Edge’s socket has more or less healed to a constant dull ache, but the strobe lights send a hot spike of agony right through his skull. He continues to stare grimly at the screen, even as his eyes begin to water and he tastes bile in the back of his mouth.

(And it will help Red _so_ much if Edge has a seizure because he’s too stupid or stubborn or self-loathing to avert his eyes. Immediately after judging the tyrant for his arrogance, no less.)

Grudgingly, Edge closes his eyes. He can still see the migraine-inducing strobe through his closed lids, painting the darkness in sullen shades of red with each flash, but closing his eyes immediately helps with the vertigo. Without the distraction of the lights, he can focus on the panicked rasp of Red’s breathing, the insect buzz of the lamps, and the constant murmur of the tyrant’s voice.

“There was an attack,” the tyrant says, as if pouring poison from his lips to fill the hollow of Red’s skull. 

The words sound practiced. This isn’t the first time he’s told Red this bullshit. Red wouldn’t have bought it if he was in his right mind. He’d have seen the lie for what it was. He wouldn’t have accepted Edge’s death without witnessing it himself, and probably not even then. But this has been going on for a while. This footage happened two weeks after Red’s supposed death, according to Fell’s logs. Red’s been beaten, drugged, tortured and exhausted, his soul dragged into the cruel light, told the same lie again and again as he sinks deeper into a haze of lethe. No one would be in their right mind after that.

“An ambush by one of the rebels,” the tyrant continues without mercy. “By some miracle, we kept you alive with these treatments, but your brother…”

Red mumbles something. It might be a denial, or a plea, but it’s too soft and too delirious to make out. Edge opens his eyes despite the lights, unable to turn his back on the pain and desperation in his brother’s voice, and watches in numb horror as Red’s sanity starts to slowly crumple beneath the weight of everything the tyrant has done to him.

The tyrant grips Red tighter. Edge has a vision of Red afterwards, his skull ringed with bruises in the shape of the tyrant’s fingers like some perverse crown. Almost gently, the tyrant says, “Your brother is dead.”

For a moment, there’s only silence. Red stares up into the lights with empty sockets. The expression dawning on his face is like a blade through Edge’s soul. Several months and a thousand miles away, unable to do anything but watch, Edge is only distantly aware of the way he’s trembling.

As if he thinks Red didn’t hear him, the tyrant tries again. “Your brother--”

Red screams.

Edge has seen Red injured more than once. He’s held Red through nightmares that had him crying out in his sleep. He’s seen Red tortured before (and vice versa), one of his teeth yanked out with pliers as Red howled and spit and swore at their captors. But he’s never heard Red scream like this, without restraint, like Edge’s death is a mortal wound and he’s bleeding out in horror and agony. 

Reflexively, Edge tries to reach for him. But he’s months too late for that. He only sits there, his outstretched hand frozen in place, and listens as Red runs out of breath to scream. When he does, he sobs in a desperate gulp of air, and Edge braces himself for Red to keep screaming until his voice gives out. But there’s only another hitched breath. Then another.

At first Edge thinks Red is weeping. The truth is worse: Red is laughing almost too softly to be heard, a bleak and terrible sound that eventually peters off into silence. Red just… stops. His eyes are black pits in his skull, seeing nothing, no clever mind ticking away behind them. He’s not even breathing. There’s only the erratic hum of the lights. And then even that ends, plunging the room into comparative darkness.

“You could have saved him,” the tyrant says. His thumb sweeps the curve of Red’s skull, and Edge seethes with hatred for a dead man. “He trusted you, and you failed him.”

Red blinks. A tear rolls down the side of his face. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“But you can make things right,” the tyrant continues. “You can avenge him. That’s the least you owe him, is it not?”

Another blink. Red is a thousand miles away, seeing horrors no one else can. It’s hard to tell if he even hears what the tyrant is saying. The tyrant cut the cords tying him to the world, and he’s drifting out of reach, to a place where there is no warmth and no light. The IV of lethe continues its slow, merciless drip.

“We don’t yet know the name of your brother’s killer, but I have my suspicions,” the tyrant says. “Help me, judge. Do what needs to be done. Let me guide your blade. We can find them together, you and I, and then we can make them all pay. What do you say?”

When every citizen of Fell was born, they weren’t asked if they wanted to serve the tyrant. Every meal they received, every moment of care in the creche, every breath of recycled air was a debt they incurred, and it was to be paid off in service before they could leave. They learned early the price to be paid by those who were stupid enough to try to run away. The lucky ones were only crippled. The unlucky ones…

When Edge razed the deepest levels of the lab, he didn’t find his brother. But he found some of the tyrant’s other projects, what little remained of them, and he gave them the only mercy he could.

Yet the tyrant pretends to offer Red a choice. Serve him and find vengeance, or die in this lab. 

Red closes his eyes. When he opens them again, his eyelights are lit, barely. But oh, how the rage in them burns. Hatred is a thin and bitter fuel, but it’s enough. It has to be. It’s all he thinks he has left. And for that, he’ll sell his soul.

In a voice as dead as his thousand yard stare, Red says, "Okay."

The tyrant smiles. And then he turns to the door, which opens to admit a herd of bustling whitecoats. Like a proud father, the tyrant tells them, “Now we can begin.”

Like a flock of scavengers, the whitecoats swarm the table with shining metal instruments and glass vials and needles and more lights, blocking Red from view, and the tyrant just smiles and smiles and--

“Stop,” Edge chokes out, hating himself for his weakness. “Stop the recording.”

The screen goes mercifully blank. Edge lurches out of his chair and stumbles from the office. He doesn’t know where he’s going, only that the small room feels like a coffin. There's not enough air.

Eventually, Undyne finds him on the back steps of their little rented safehouse. He's smoked two of those wretched cigarillos Red liked, a nasty habit he picked up in his brother's absence. Although smoking is a generous term. Mostly Edge just holds the cigarillo in his fingers and lets it burn down to ash, wreathing himself in the familiar sweet smell of its smoke like incense.

Undyne takes one look at him and grimaces. “Hey, remember I said _I_ oughta be the one to watch that shit instead of you doing it as some fucked up guilt trip?"

“No," Edge says flatly. "I don't recall that particular conversation."

"I guess that must've been while you were brooding over Red while he tripped fever balls," Undyne says. She plunks down onto the step beside him and shoulders him hard. "Move over, asshole! I can't believe how much room your bony ass takes up!"

Grumbling, Edge scoots over to make room for her. 

The safehouse is isolated from civilization by necessity, set in a cluster of thick woods with a sizable lake behind it. The waters are still as a pane of glass, reflecting pale amber skies. When he first saw the lake, he had some vague idea that Red might enjoy the novelty of actual wilderness while he recovered, or at least the novelty of bitching mightily about the bugs and dirt included in said wilderness. Stupidly optimistic, in retrospect. They can't even let Red out of his room for fear that he'll shank someone and bolt.

As Edge and Undyne stare out upon the lake, Undyne asks gruffly, "That bad, huh?"

"Worse than I expected," Edge says. The cigarillo has burnt down enough to risk his fingertips, so he puts it out in a half-finished cup of yesterday's green tea. "How was the call to the Battleship?"

"The Dogi are holding down the fort just fine without us," Undyne says. "They've done some jobs running cargo. Small-time stuff to keep 'em all busy. They'll wait 'til we get back to do anything too exciting."

Another complication to consider. After the tyrant was dead, Edge expected the other rebels to scatter to the winds. Many of them had, but a surprising number had wanted to stay together. In the void left by the tyrant, they needed someone to follow, and apparently Undyne and Edge were acceptable substitutions. Only a few dozen refugees of Fell came with them, but they were enough to crew a stolen battleship.

Of course, that was before Edge, Alphys and Undyne abruptly left all at once to deal with the Red situation, leaving a crew of traumatized soldiers to their own devices. After a successful rebellion, it would be very easy for them to decide to add a little mutiny to their list of achievements.

"It's been weeks," Edge says. "We can't expect their patience to last forever. Things are under control here. You should go back."

Undyne caws a laugh. “Patience? It’s not _patience_ , you dumbass! They’d follow you anywhere!”

“Not me,” Edge says. “You were the captain. You led them. I simply--”

“Killed the tyrant?” Undyne asks. There’s a bitter edge to her grin. “Everybody knows he and I were… well, whatever the fuck we were, for all the good it did me by the end. Those people all remember who brought me up.”

“And they know you turned on him when it counted,” Edge says. “You can’t help who raised you, captain. You were only a child.”

“I grew up a long time ago,” Undyne says. “I’ve got no excuses, so don’t _you_ go around making ‘em for me! What I’m saying is that the crew’ll follow me, sure, but not without you around to shank me if I get any funny ideas.” 

“You’re safe on that account. You’ve never had a funny idea in your life,” Edge says. “You think noogies are the height of humor.”

Unsurprisingly, Undyne takes that as an invitation to grab him in a headlock that threatens to rip his skull off his spine and then viciously noogies him. Worse, it’s her metal arm. She taunts, “What, like this? Yeah, this is fucking hilarious! Can’t you tell, you nerd?”

He elbows her in the stomach hard enough to drive the breath from her. The noogies only intensify. It hurts, but it’s also the closest thing to a hug that the two of them will allow themselves. He tolerates it with some good-natured cursing for a few minutes, then shoves her away. “Enough! I yield.”

“Fuck yeah, you do!” Undyne says smugly. Her eyepatch is askew; she readjusts it. “Anyway, no more of that bullshit about me leaving, you got it? You need me around to save your ass. Besides, if the crew decides to bail, then screw ‘em! We’re fine on our own.”

Edge gestures vaguely at the safehouse and the pale shadow of his brother within. “This is what you consider fine?”

“We’re all alive, aren’t we?” Undyne shoots back.

Edge sighs. “Fair enough.”

“Exactly.” With a grunt, Undyne pushes herself back to her feet. She rubs absently at the seam where her metal arm joins with her shoulder, which he knows aches a little when it’s cold. “So, you gonna let me watch some of those tapes for you, or do I gotta dunk your head in the lake ‘til you cry uncle?”

There’s a dysfunctional part of Edge screaming that only he should watch those tapes, as both penance and a way of protecting Red’s privacy, but given that he needed to take an extended smoke break to calm down after less than ten minutes, it’s more efficient to let her help him and (by extension) Red. Edge can’t afford to indulge his guilt or his stupid pride.

“No dunking necessary,” Edge says. “I’d appreciate the help.”

Undyne flicks the back of his skull with a metal finger, resulting in a loud ‘ping’. “No problem, buddy. Hey, how ‘bout you stare at Red like a weirdo creeper for a while? That usually cheers you up.”

“Thank you, captain,” Edge says dryly. “I’ll try that.”

Judging by her triumphant grin, his sarcasm is wasted on her. But she has a point. Seeing for himself that Red is within reach and (relatively) intact may be the only thing that can silence the memory of that surveillance footage. So he goes back inside, leaving Undyne to squint at the lake like she’s trying to conjure some watery horror for her to punch to death.

Unsurprisingly, Red is exactly where Edge left him. The door to Red’s room (or, more honestly, his cell) stands open. The ward is still active. Red’s been conscious for a few days now, post-fever, and he’s gone back and forth at least a dozen times as to whether he demands that the door be open or shut. His latest verdict was, “I know you fuckers got surveillance on me anyway, so I might as well be able to keep an eye on you too.”

And yet Red hasn’t really bothered looking out the door much, at least not after he got a glimpse of Undyne and froze up in horror like she was a vengeful ghost before retreating entirely. (He ignored her attempts to talk to him. Alphys has stuck to the medsuite ever since; Edge thinks she’s afraid Red would flinch from her like that too.) No, instead he paces the room like a wolf in a too-small cage, waiting for an opportunity to escape.

Red must catch some flicker of movement out of his peripheral vision, because he looks up his quest to wear a hole in the floor. His eyes narrow to slits. The same man who screamed himself raw with grief and fury at the lie of Edge’s death now looks at him with nothing less than hatred. It hurts.

When Edge (can't) doesn't speak, Red demands, "What the fuck do you want?"

What does Edge want? To kill the tyrant again, but slower this time. To have Red look at him with recognition. To bring this ward down and hold his brother close. To get back the time they lost. 

If Edge simply tells Red what he ought to remember, Red won’t believe a word of it. After what the tyrant did to him, twisting him up in lies until it became a noose around his neck, Edge can’t blame Red for his paranoia about being manipulated. It’s better to let Red come to the truth on his own. But that doesn’t mean Edge can’t lay bait. 

Edge leans against the doorframe, which is as close to Red as he can get. He says, “There’s a casino in Mosphei.”

Suspiciously, Red says, "So fucking what?"

“You asked what I wanted,” Edge says. “I’d like to go there. I can get fruity drinks in unnatural colors, and you can cheat wildly at cards until they kick us out.”

In truth, that was Red's dream, not his own. Red probably wouldn't have told Edge about it at all, but he'd been extremely drunk at the time. He'd even told Edge about the part of the idle fantasy where they took their ill-gotten gains, bought a ship, and ran as far from Fell as they could get. Just the two of them, together and free.

They have a ship now. They have their freedom. They have each other. But Edge wouldn't mind some fruity drinks to sip as he watches his brother bleed a casino dry, one bluff at a time.

Red squints at him. For a moment, there’s a flicker of the same look in his eyes he had when he first saw Edge in the ruins of the lab, like a drowning man struggling to get his head above water. "Mosphei, huh."

Edge shrugs. "I hear it's lovely this time of year."

Red gives his head a vicious shake like he’s trying to jar something loose. When he looks back at Edge again, his eyelights have regained their focus. He drawls, “So izzat why you’re doing this? You wanna take me on a fucking field trip and make a shit-ton of money on poker?”

“No,” Edge says, amused. “You think I let you nearly beat me to death for a few hundred thousand cred and the joy of pissing off the mob? Hardly a good investment.”

Red grunts, grudgingly acknowledging the point. He starts to pace again, but he’s watching Edge the whole time, examining him from every angle. “Maybe you’re just an idiot.”

“You could make that argument,” Edge says. "I suppose it’s a matter of opinion as to which of us is acting like an idiot. Of course, considering that _you’ve_ decided to trust the tyrant, the evidence is on my side.”

The way Red laughs is unnervingly reminiscent of his laughter as he broke. “Trust him? You did the whole fucking universe a favor when you killed him. It ain’t enough to wipe your slate clean, not with me, but I’m not crying any tears for him.”

“Well, that’s--” Edge stops short. “Wait. How did you know I’m the one who killed the tyrant? Who told you that? Fell? An informant of some kind?”

Clearly thrown, Red stops pacing. “Nobody told me nothing. I just kinda...”

Red trails off, looking at Edge with a furrow between his brows. Edge doesn’t nudge him to finish his sentence, although he wants very badly to know what’s going on in Red’s skull.

Finally, Red looks away. “I figured if anybody coulda killed him, it’d be you.”

Red’s voice is emotionless, giving Edge very little to work with. But the implied faith Red has in him, even now, knocks the breath out of Edge. A knot of thorns closes around Edge’s soul, making him bleed both pride and sorrow. 

“You were the idiot in charge of the rebellion,” Red continues, but it’s clear the one he’s trying to convince is himself. “‘Course you killed him. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Interesting,” Edge says. “That’s a rather naive assumption. Tell me, how often have you seen a leader of any rebellion actually do their own dirty work?”

One corner of Red’s mouth gives a reluctant twitch. “What do you want, a goddamn trophy? Congrats on doing your own killing?”

“No,” Edge says. “I want my family back.”

Honesty. Sincerity. It’s like ripping open his own wounds, and the scent of blood in the water earns him Red’s full attention. Red studies him through narrowed eyes. For the first time since he found Red again, Edge feels that familiar sense of pressure in the air. A warning prickles up his spine. The judge stirs.

 _Come on,_ Edge wills the judge. He never thought he’d be so glad to have it turned on him. _You see me. You know who I am. Tell him._

Red tips his head to one side, considering Edge with new interest.

“What?” Edge asks. “Finally realized I’m not the one who’s been lying to you?”

Unsurprisingly, Red side-steps the simple question. He draws closer to the door and says, “Hey, so tell me again that you’ll let me go if I don’t remember you.”

“Oh, that,” Edge says. “Well, in that specific instance I was lying through my teeth. I wanted to see if you’d notice.”

For a moment, Red has the exact same expression he did when he accidentally walked face-first into the ward. Then he recovers, eyelights sparking bright with anger. Not hatred, not fury; only a familiar (familial) aggravation. “You--”

“Or perhaps not,” Edge says thoughtfully. “I could have been lying just now. It must be incredibly vexing for you not to be able to tell. How strange it is that I’m the only one you have that problem with. Don’t you think so?”

With a disgusted noise, Red turns away and starts pacing again. But Edge can see that his words struck home. Even if it’s only for a moment, he’s gotten Red to actually _think_ instead of just lashing out at everyone who comes near him like an animal in a trap. Edge knows from long experience that once Red gets to turning over a puzzle in his mind, it’s damned near impossible for him to stop. 

“Don’t you got anything better to do?” Red snaps. “I can’t hear myself think with you yapping at me.”

“I imagine it’d help you concentrate if you actually ate something.” Edge pulls a ration bar from his jacket pocket and tosses it through the ward. Red flinches at the sound of it hitting the ground, looking at it with a combination of yearning and distrust. Edge deadpans, “Oops. How clumsy of me to drop this sealed, tamper-proof food. It’s certainly not an offering.”

Red gives him a long, hostile glare.

“Of course, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to retrieve it,” Edge says. “And you’d be better prepared to escape and murder me if you ate it. It’s only practical.”

With a growl, Red snatches the ration bar off the floor. He examines the package, carefully extracts the bar, and breaks off a tiny piece, which he puts in his mouth. When that doesn’t kill him, he gives Edge another deeply suspicious look.

“I don’t blame you for your caution,” Edge says. “Considering that you were injecting an unknown drug directly into your soul, who knows what could happen if you ate a fully wrapped ration bar?”

Annoyed, Red says, “Oh, fuck off, boss. You--”

Red stops. It’s hard to tell if it’s because he realizes what he said or if he simply sees the flare of desperate hope in Edge’s soul. Either way, Red looks like a man who thought he was walking on concrete only to hear thin ice breaking beneath him, ready to give way.

Edge echoes, “Boss?”

“Slip of the tongue,” Red says. His voice is casual, but the look in his eyes is distant. “See, it’s what I called him.”

“Your brother?” Edge asks.

Red meets his eyes. His grin is brittle but sharp, like a glass bottle someone shattered in a barfight and drove into the belly of some unsuspecting bystander. “The tyrant.”

Edge flinches. Desperately, he says, “No. That wasn’t--”

But Red turns his back on him. Still clutching his ration bar, he retreats to the corner and slides down the wall. He sits there, breaking the ration bar into little bits and rolling them up into little beads with his fingertips before he eats them one by one. It’s an old trick Edge has seen him do a thousand times, nursing slim rations as long as he can to try to trick himself out of being hungry.

Edge says, “Red.”

But Red’s actual name, so rarely used, pales in comparison to the word that’s always been both insult and endearment to them. Calling his name doesn’t make Red look up. He only continues playing with his food and, once that’s finished, staring at the wall as if envying its utter blankness. 

For the rest of the evening, nothing Edge says to him gets any response at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: medical and psychological torture; needles; Red being drugged; offscreen non-consensual soultouching; offscreen amputation (Red bites off an unnamed scientist's fingers); medical induction of a seizure; psychological manipulation; very brief flashback to Red losing his tooth during torture; experimentation on prisoners; typical fellbros dysfunction; past food insecurity
> 
> \- The ship Edge and Undyne stole from Fell for pirate reasons is indeed named The Battleship, because the tyrant was no better at naming things than Asgore.
> 
> \- The reason Red reacted to Undyne like he saw a ghost is because for a moment he thought she was Target One and it freaked him the fuck out.
> 
> \- Weirdly enough, I had the "flashing lights to induce seizure" bit plotted out before the whole Cyberpunk 2077 incident happened, based on the same diagnostic test they replicated in the game. Whoops.


End file.
